


Problems with Boundaries

by brightwhiteparabolas



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, Batman: The Animated Series, Suicide Squad (2016)
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Corruption, Doctor/Patient, Explosions, F/M, Fighting Kink, Hospitals, I still feel sick, Implied Sexual Content, Kidnapping, Knives, Masochism, Medication, Mental Disintegration, Mental Instability, Mildly Dubious Consent, Other, Police, Psychosis, Sadism, Someone told me I post at the worst possible time oh well, Violence, Why Did I Write This?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-12
Updated: 2019-09-11
Packaged: 2020-06-25 02:03:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 32,546
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19736128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brightwhiteparabolas/pseuds/brightwhiteparabolas
Summary: A second year orthopedist with a challenging past, Harleen Quinzel is young, forceful, and almost entirely lacking in self-awareness, her demanding schedule a convenience that masks an inability to form normal relationships.When a forensic patient is brought in late one evening, laughing and covered with blood, Harleen doesn't realize that she is about to pique the interest of one of the city's most fascinating, least predictable criminals.  Her life will change for good, and very much for the worse.





	1. The Night Float - 1

**Author's Note:**

> I didn't know in which Bat fandom to place this and I assumed that whatever I did, I would piss people off because it isn't cannon. So let me state this upfront: I understand if you hate this, and it's fine, and I'm sorry.
> 
> Although 'Mad Love' is amazing, the crazy psychiatrist trope drives me crazy, which is why I wrote this. Once I turned Harley into a different kind of doctor - the stereotypical orthopedist is a former athlete who lacks insight and likes to smash things up, which I thought was perfect - I had to turn Mr. J. into a different kind of criminal. Today, with Big Crime moving off the streets and into cyberspace, I wanted to do a Joker who was a highly intellectual, corporate finance kind of guy. Like a mentally ill Peter Thiel with better dress sense. So I somehow ended up rewriting the whole relationship origin story.
> 
> My excuse for committing this outrage is that I am involved in mental healthcare stuff. Yes, it's a comic, and yes, it's a movie, and yes, I'm daft for letting it get to me, but no. Just no. High security forensic psychiatric hospitals are nothing like Arkham. Psychiatrists who become romantically involved with disturbed patients are the violators, never the other way around. Criminality and mental illness are not the same thing. And still ... I love all of it.
> 
> I would love to chat to any of you awesome people about DC stuff, writing, or anything related.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A well-known patient is admitted to Gotham Mercy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the first chapter of twelve. The work falls into three sections, 'The Night Float', 'Free Falling' and 'Endgame', each of which has four chapters. The final section also has a short Epilogue. The work's been completed - insofar as I ever finish anything - and I'm aiming to publish one and sometimes two chapters every week on Friday.
> 
> (ao3 insists on marking this as a 13-chapter fic ever since I uploaded the Epilogue draft. Have it your own way, ao3. It's an Epilogue, not a full chapter, and it's written from a different point of view, but whatever.)

The man on the gurney was so long-limbed that his left hand almost hit the floor as he leaned sideways over one arm. He held the other hand to his mouth, laughing softly into his knuckles. Blood ran between his fingers over the metal cuff around his wrist and was smeared across his face and his white dress shirt so badly that I couldn’t see where it was coming from, the corner of his mouth, his nose, or what looked like a gash across his left eyebrow. I wasn’t happy about the mess on the floor, and there was a brutal draft coming in from the ambulance bay.

I stepped forward. “What’s this, Batman?”

“Wait.” Batman’s voice was gravelly and unnatural under the black cowl as he put out a hand to stop me. Like most of Gotham City, I only knew him from his fleeting, enigmatic TV appearances, and the reality was jarring. His body armor was splattered with dirt and blood and I felt that he was using his bulk deliberately when he looked down at my name badge. 

“Dr. Quinzel, do you know who this is?”

“Forensic admit, yeah.”

“It’s the Joker. You should stay back.”

“I need to look at him and we don’t have a room ready.” I folded my arms across my white coat to look more imposing and keep out the cold. The request for a secured private space wasn’t that unusual, given the population we served, but Jim Gordon’s boys had arrived too quickly for us to deliver and without the advance warning that we would have a couple of local celebrities on our hands. I moved around Batman and addressed the man on the gurney directly. 

“Sorry we can’t take you up yet,” I said to him. “Can you tell me what happened?”

The man shifted, spat out some blood and ignored me. “I asked for a lawyer, not a doctor,” he said. “You’re getting your white-collar professionals mixed up, Bats.”

Batman snapped his fingers. One of the nurses came running, all breathlessness and shiny eyes. “You’ll need some major tranquilizers,” he told her.

“Excuse me?” I said.

“You should sedate him for your own safety. Haloperidol and promethazine will do it.”

“Thank you so much for the pharmacology lesson,” I said in my sweetest voice. “I told you I needed to look at him. No chemical restraints unless the patient is a danger to the staff or themselves.”

The older of the two policemen snorted, and I suddenly remembered the officer who had taken my father away on that quiet Sunday morning in spring so long ago. Blue-collar versus white-collar, cop versus doc. I knew he had enjoyed entering a large, beautiful home with an arrest warrant and leaving with its owner in handcuffs, surrounded by flashing cameras. I don’t like the police and I don’t trust them any further than I can spit. 

I came to the side of the gurney. “I’m not sedating you unless I have to,” I said and looked straight into his eyes. They were long and narrow, a strange grey-purple color, and burned with such intense, malicious amusement that I felt a jolt and had to look away. “But you’re in custody, so we have to follow the rules. Physical restraints and two correctional officers at all times.”

“He’s violent,” offered the younger policeman, hands in his pockets. His shirt said he was Lt. L. Delgado. “Sedation would be a reasonable precaution.”

“Violent?” exclaimed the Joker, if that was who he was. He showed no obvious signs of pain. “Shouldn’t you be sticking a needle into Batsy then?”

“That arm’s almost certainly broken,” I said. “We’ll need some X-rays and anti-biotics just in case. I want you to keep an eye on the pain and tell us if you notice any changes.”

“Miss – “said the officer, raising his voice.

“It’s Dr., not Miss. And I’m sorry, but if you want me to sedate him, you’ll have to go to medical school first and come back as my attending physician. Okay?” 

“I didn’t mean – “

I told myself to keep my flaring temper under control.

“You are _lovely_ ,” murmured the Joker.

“Do me a favor, please,” I muttered as I hooked him up to an IV, moving the pole well out of his reach and mine. A vivid, satisfying image of myself cracking it over Lt. L. Delgado’s head flashed across my mind. “I’m pushing my luck here. Could you please not do whatever they think you might do?”

“If you don’t bite anyone, I won’t either.” He licked his teeth, which were discolored with blood.

I laughed and scribbled something on the orders for radiology. The officers and two orderlies were preparing to take him away, and the older officer gave me an admonishing look. I knew that he probably meant well, but my face tensed. I pushed one of my hands into a pocket and curled my fingers tightly in on themselves. 

Batman stood next to me. He smelled strange and metallic, like blood and rust and gasoline. I felt a tap on my arm.

“Doctor,” he said. His voice sounded tired. “You’re a good professional and you want to help. What I’m trying to say, not very well, is don’t get too close. In any way.”

“How so?” I folded my arms across myself again, right hand still balled into a fist. 

“He can be violent and unpredictable, whatever it looks like now. I know him very well.”

“Maybe you should come visit then.”

“Maybe I should,” he said. He sighed. “I’d be a terrible doctor,” he said. “No bedside manner. But Gotham needs medics like you, Dr. Quinzel. There aren’t enough in places like this. You should look after yourself.”

“No, people don’t want to work in public hospitals,” I said. I suddenly liked him much better. “Not in this city at least. Thanks, Batman.”

“He can be charming. Don’t let him get to you.”

My shoes tapped on polished grey concrete as I moved from the private ambulance bay further into the warmth of the entrance. I needed to get away from the police and from Batman. I hit the wall with my fist when I saw that no-one else was in the small corridor with me, and asked myself whether Gotham’s finest would have given Ben Gifford, our strapping third-year resident, the same reception that they had to me. 

But Ben is so docile, I had to admit to myself. Six foot two and a pushover. He’d have gone right along with whatever they’d have told him to do. I, on the other hand, had no problem pushing back, and didn’t see why the police should lay a finger on any patient of mine, unless it was with that patient’s permission and my consent or my attending’s say-so. Just thinking about it made me want to kick Delgado’s bland white face in.

My cell rang as I stepped back into the main building, distracting me from angry ruminations. It was Eli.

“Is this a good time?” Eli sounded very young when he was anxious. I smiled, taken back to when he was a skinny, angel-faced twelve-year old.

“It’s never a good time, bro. What’s up?”

“Are you going to see Dad next weekend once you’re done with night float?”

“Why?” I was surprised. Eli had hardly spoken to our father in the seven years he’d been in prison and had changed his last name to Quinn as soon as he possibly could. After years of intermittent screaming matches with him on the importance of love, loyalty and having the guts to stick things through, I’d finally let him be. His sweetness and natural conformism hadn’t cut him out for this.

“If you’re going, can I come with you?”

“Wow.”

“Yeah.” There was a pause. Then I heard his shaky laugh. “Thanks for not being a bitch about it,” he said. 

“I’m proud of you.”

“You know Dad’s got his release date,” he said. “Aunt Betty told me.”

I said nothing and hung onto the phone. 

“Oh no, I made you cry.”

I ran into a bathroom, scraping the back of my wrist across my damp eyes and smiling. Since that one terrible incident when Dad had walked out of a minimum-security facility on the anniversary of Mom’s death, he’d been a model prisoner. 

“It’s a bit much to take in just now, “I said. “That’s great news. Yes, I was planning to go to Conestoga at the weekend. And I just met Batman. I can’t keep it to myself.”

“No way.”

“I didn’t like him at first.”

“What happened? Are you ok?”

“I’m fine. Just too many policemen running around here right now.”

“You met Batman. I’m so jealous.”

I chuckled. “I’ll give him your number if he comes back. We’ll talk later, okay?”

I pushed the phone back into my pocket, hung my head over the sink and let myself cry for about a minute to release the tension. It had been an eventful few hours since the shift had started, but nothing out of the ordinary besides the brief talk with my brother. 

Alright, I admitted to myself. Maybe I shouldn’t have watched the Doha World Championships yesterday. I love artistic gymnastics, probably always will, but something still twists inside me when I remember what it was like to be one of those girls with their wide eyes and their scraped-back hair and their tight smiles. Was I really as good as that? I had asked myself, and had to answer as the scores flashed up: No, I was better. The great white hope of US gymnastics who went absolutely nowhere.

I had watched the girls embrace their coaches and asked myself whether any of them had ever thought about killing themselves or anyone else to get away from things that could never be talked about and that would never be believed even if they were. I hadn’t slept well before my shift, and maybe Doha was why I was so on edge this evening.

Or maybe it was as simple as the night float finally beginning to get to me. Everyone said that second year residency was the toughest. Whatever it was, I needed to get hold of myself. As the state’s largest Level One trauma center, Gotham Wayne couldn’t afford us being any more tired or emotional than we had to be.

Ah, Gotham Wayne General, recently re-named after a huge, headline-grabbing grant from the Thomas and Martha Wayne Foundation. Like any large, inner-city hospital, we were run-down, burnt-out, and strapped for cash, but I wouldn’t have wanted to work anywhere else. Yes, we treated patients with no insurance, of questionable legal status, and frequent flyers who swore they’d kill us when we wouldn’t give them more opioids, but this was home, from its discolored, pock-marked floors, old, paper-based systems and big, friendly, we-don’t-give-a-shit-so-long-as-you-do-your-job team.

I loved my job, and there was no reason I couldn’t deal with a high-profile new admit despite the entourage of police officers that came with him. I thought about the Joker as I walked down the corridor. Of course, I knew the name - who in Gotham didn’t – but not much about him. Eli would know more. Something to do with money management or complex financial engineering, and murky but persistent rumors about connections with the Falcones, the Maronis and other regional crime syndicates. From what I recollected, which was hazy, there was little available information of substance about him, not that I was especially interested in Gotham-centric scandal. My only regular news fix was Lois Lane’s weekly regional round-up, which was breezy, upbeat, and with more of a Metropolis spin to it. GC-TV was full of arcane city politics and far too depressing for me.

The images were back from radiology and I was calmer now. I grabbed my water bottle from the fridge and looked at the computer. It seemed relatively straightforward: a nice clean fracture, only the ulna, which probably meant that someone had landed a direct blow to his arm. It wouldn’t require surgery if it could be kept aligned in place to heal, and I didn’t see the need for a consult. I made some notes on his chart – he was listed only as Mr. J. – and decided it was time for a few minutes’ break. 

The residents’ lounge was empty. I gave in to temptation and did a couple of back-springs across the room. Then I lay down full-length on the old couch with only my feet hanging off the edge of the seat. It would be nice to be able to shut my eyes for ten minutes.

I was startled out of a light doze by my beeper, and persistent tapping on the door.

“Dr. Quinzel?”

“Fuck,” I muttered. I scrambled back into my shoes and towards the door.

“Can you go talk to the forensic admit?” The nurse looked anxious. “He’s saying he’s in pain and wants the restraints off. The police aren’t buying it. I don’t really know what to do.” 

“I don’t either,” I sighed. “He shouldn’t be that uncomfortable by now. Is he giving you a hard time?’

“Not really.”

“You know you’re not supposed to talk to him much, right?”

“Uh-huh, but he’s funny.”

I followed her down the hallway.

“OK if I go in?” I asked the officer at the door. He nodded, and I stepped inside. The other man, seated inside the room, was Delgado. He gave me a quick, nervous look.

The few images I’d seen of the Joker were in blurred newsprint, and I wouldn’t have recognized this man from them. Though cleaned up now, there was nothing wholesome about his scarred, angular face or long mouth and nose. His hair was streaked green and fell over his forehead from a widow’s peak to frame his ears and his neck, which was as long and slim as the rest of him. There was something compelling about those sharp, ruined features. Maybe it was the look of intelligent, malicious humor that he gave me when I came into the room, as if we were sharing a private joke, or the way his eyes shifted and flickered. I could feel his tamped-down, restless energy, and whether it was curiosity, fear, disgust, or something else, my heart rate picked up and my palms become stickier. I realized that I wasn’t comfortable.

“So the pain’s worse,” I said. I pulled on a pair of gloves, doing my best not to look at him. It was easy because of the need to focus on his arm. The skin was shiny and discolored around the area of the break and I couldn’t feel much of a pulse.

“Could you curl your fingers for me?”

He closed his left hand slowly, and I noticed how long his fingers were.

“How much pain? On a scale of one to ten, where – “

“About a six”, he interrupted. “The long arm of the law doesn’t have any bones to break, and my arm has several. It wasn’t a fair match.” He shot me a sly, sideways look. 

I tried to keep back my laughter, and ended up making a snorting sound. 

“I’ve been here long enough to hear some bad ones,” I said, “but that’s truly terrible.”

“I’ll be much more comfortable if some of these restraints can come off. They’re unnecessary.”

I drew a gloved finger down the inside of his forearm towards his wrist. “Feel that?”

He shook his head. “Hardly,” he drawled. “If I have no sensation on the left, I’m all right, aren’t I? 

“Not funny,” I said. “I want to talk to my attending about you. No food for now just in case we need to get you into surgery, okay?”

“You’re leaving again?” He put his right hand over his heart. “What am I doing wrong?”

“It’s not you, it’s me,” I said. “I’m not the consultant surgeon.“

His eyes glinted. “Come on now. How difficult can it be to cut someone up?”

“You’d be surprised, Mr. J.,” I said. 

“Why don’t you tell me about that then?” I heard him say, as if from far away.

My mind flitted back to all the dreams and all the nightmares I had ever had about killing someone, always the same person, waking up only to discover that I had failed again. I took a deep breath and turned to leave the room. There was something about him that just reeled me in, made me want to get close up and stare. I couldn’t let it get to me.


	2. The Night Float - 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The GCPD break some rules, and so does Harleen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Harley's dream at the end of the chapter was inspired in part by imagery from the Harleen fan art panels drawn by the outrageously, amazingly, incomparably talented Stjepan Sejic. Search on DeviantArt and gawp. Then everyone go out and buy everything that Stjepan and Linda Sejic have ever drawn or written.

I have my faults as a doctor in training – impulsive, headstrong, controlling – but I know my strengths. (“Takes the time to explain things to patients. ““Pleasant, empathetic. Engages easily with others.”) My skills were wasted on this man. As I went through the pre-op explanations and consents, I realized that he was hardly listening. He was looking at me with amusement, as if I were a first-grader talking about their homework instead of a medical professional describing a major surgery that he was about to undergo.

“You think you’re very good at this”, he said.

I tried not to look surprised. Strangely, and despite the nurse’s little gasp of outrage, I didn’t feel that I was under attack. His voice was relaxed, and while there was something frightening about how easily he could read me, I didn’t dislike being under this kind of scrutiny. It was flattering, almost exciting, and there was no point in trying to brush him off. I guessed that he would keep coming at me if I gave an evasive answer, so I responded as directly as I could.

“I do think I’m good at explaining things, yes, but you don’t seem to be listening. Most people wouldn’t think an emergency fasciotomy was funny. It’s a pretty damn big deal. And you’re lucky to get Dr. Elliott, he’s terrific. Do you have any questions? There’s not much time.”

The narrow eyes opened wider. “Tommy Elliott?”

“Do you know him?”

The Joker whistled between his teeth. “Oh yes. Yes, I know him. No arm could be in better hands. Can we talk about something else now?”

“We still need your consent.”

He scribbled something on the papers that I passed him, not taking his eyes off me. The next question surprised me again.

“Who gave you that name? Harleen. It’s terrible.”

I burst out laughing as my beeper went off. I had another patient to see down in ER.

“That’ll have to wait until you’re post-op, Mr. J. Good luck.”

I touched his right hand and felt a jolt of static shock. Since he would most likely be here for at least a few more days, I should probably look at that forensic patient policy again. He grinned, and I noticed his teeth properly for the first time. They were long, beautifully shaped, and slightly discolored.

“Your name sounds like a cleaning product,” he said. “Like an abrasive, old-fashioned cleaning product.”

“Great name for a doctor then,” I said over my shoulder. “Bracingly hygienic.”

“I like Harley much better.”

I saw Delgado looking out the door after me as if I had lost my mind. Fuck it. I was never very good at sticking to the rules, and I was still laughing when I got to the elevator.

The evening marched on briskly. For a Thursday night, it wasn’t too bad for the six p.m. to midnight rush-hour. Things usually became very quiet around two a.m. unless we had a spectacular accident or a shooting, either of which was always a possibility in Gotham City.

I checked the system briefly and saw that he still wasn’t out. I chatted to Mrs. Abrahams for a few minutes and ran her bloodwork down to the lab while wondering how much he would annoy Elliott’s team before the anesthetic kicked in. I wished I could have scrubbed in with them. That was one of the worst things about night float: it wasn’t a technical learning experience. You ran from one patient to another, sometimes so overloaded that the only way you could remember what to check up on for whom was to make a list and review it constantly. By the time I signed off officially at six a.m., I couldn’t always remember making all the notes that I went through at hand-over.

The Bone Beeper had been quiet for fifteen minutes when a new officer, Rafferty, rambled over while I was running through my check-list again.

“He’s back in his room now and wide awake. Can you give him something to make him sleep? He won’t shut the fuck up. Pardon my French, Miss… Doctor.”

“I probably can’t, but I’ll go talk to him if you want.”

“Please.”

He trudged back in the direction he had come from, shaking his head, and I followed.

“Doctor. Still here, or is this a pleasant hallucination?”

“I’m the night float. What’s going on? Can’t sleep? Pain? Nausea?”

They’d used a wound vac dressing on him and the arm was elevated. His face was slightly flushed, and his eyes were as alive and malicious as they had been several hours earlier. He gave me that odd sideways look of his.

“Can you get them to take off some of the restraints? They’re really uncomfortable. I hate ‘em.”

He spoke calmly but his eyes glinted. I thought of my father and told myself not to get into an altercation with the police. Whether it was about Dad or this strange, attractive man with his horribly scarred face, it was often best not to ask them for anything, no matter what the circumstances.

“I wish I could help,” I said. “But the police are the only ones who can take those things off.”

“You could say it’s medically necessary.”

I briefly shut my eyes. “I can’t,” I said. “I wish I could, but it wouldn’t be true."

He shrugged.

Rafferty cleared his throat. He sounded embarrassed.

“If you’re okay, doctor, I’ll be outside. The door stays open. We’ll be there with a direct line of sight to you.”

“They don’t have to hear what you’re saying.”

“I know, but they do have to see you. We have policies about people who come in under police custody. I’m sorry. I know it’s difficult.”

“I won’t kill you.” He grinned.

“Well, thank you.”

“You can come sit closer to me.”

I tried to imagine his face without the scars, and I couldn’t.

“You know what, Mr. J? No-one should come too near you unless they have to. You have an open wound under that dressing, and people are full of germs. Even me.”

“It’s not that easy to kill me, sweet pea. So, what about your horrible name?”

I explained, as I was used to explaining, that it was an amalgam of my parents’ names, that I’d hated it as a teenager, but didn’t feel it was right to change it.

"Where are they? Your parents?”

“I don’t know if I want to answer all these questions.”

“If I had something else to do, I wouldn’t be bothering you. Do you play chess?”

“No. Don’t you think you should try to sleep?”

“Now why would I want to sleep if you stay here and talk to me?”

I laughed. “You know I can’t do that, Mr. J.”

Just over twenty-four hours later, I was on my way back to the room, but this time on my own. The nurse was right to have called me, and I was angry. Something was wrong. There was no officer outside the door, but the lights were on and I could hear the buzz of men’s voices inside. I knocked and pushed the door open. A man in his mid-thirties swung round and stared at me. He wore khakis and a rumpled, light blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and he was handsome in a bulky, dark-haired, broken-nosed kind of way.

“I’m one of the doctors on night float,” I said. “I’d like to know what you’re doing. No-one’s cleared this with us.”

“We don’t need you to clear anything. It’s police business.”

“And who are you?” I was starting to lose my temper.

The man guffawed. “Aw, I’m all distracted now.”

I took a good look around the room. The only officer I knew was Rafferty, who was looking shiftily at his feet. The third man was big, blonde and balding with arms like small whales. I glanced at the Joker. He was sitting up and his face was unreadable.

“You okay?” I asked. He nodded slowly.

“You’re here to do a number on him, aren’t you,” I said.

The dark-haired man put out a hand to stop me coming any nearer.

“I’m Detective Hazard,” he said. “You know as well as I do that we’re in charge here.”

I walked up to the gurney, standing with my back to J.

“You want to mess him up a bit? Well, guess what, the law says you can’t. Medically, he’s just like any other patient. So, no, I’m not leaving the room until you’re out of here.”

“He’s in good enough shape to answer our questions.”

“No, he isn’t. He’s less than forty-eight hours after an emergency operation, he’s still on IV, and he’s back in surgery tomorrow. You need to get out now.”

“You’re obstructing justice.”

“Obstructing justice my ass.” I could smell beer on his breath. “I’m obstructing justice if justice is what happens at two in the morning after a few drinks.”

“Do you want me to drag you out of here? Because I would love, I would absolutely love, to do that.”

“Dan,” said Rafferty. “Come on.” He motioned towards the door.

“Why are you defending this freak?” Hazard asked me.

“He is not a freak,” I said. I realized that I had raised my voice.

“He’s a sadistic, make-up wearing freak,” he said.

Then he lunged at me, catching me in a bear hug that pinned my arms to my sides and crushed me into his torso.

“Now that’s what a real man feels like. And you’re getting out of here so we can talk to him.”

“You’re drunk,” I said. “Let go of me.”

“Let her go, Dan,” said the blonde man. The room was tense.

“Stop it,” I said. I tried to wriggle my upper body away from his and couldn’t. “Let go.”

“I don’t think so,” he grinned.

He let one of his hands slide down under my butt, and something in me snapped and panicked. Not this again, I thought, and took in such a huge gulp of air that I almost choked. I managed to twist my head sideways and sink my teeth into his forearm, biting down and striking out with my right knee in the same moment. I connected directly with his groin, and he crumpled with a strange, strangled sound. At a different time, without a couple of drinks in him, I might not have stood a chance. For good measure, and just because I could, I followed up with a kick to the base of his spine as he lay there on the floor.

“Don’t you fucking touch me,” I said, looking down at him. “And don’t you fucking touch my patients.”

I stepped back towards the night table next to the gurney and picked up a heavy plastic cup that was lying on it. If it had been made of glass, I might have smashed it open on the table’s wooden surface to make myself a more effective weapon. In that moment, I realized that I wasn’t safe because I had no idea what I would have done with something sharp in my hands. With the cup in my hand, I advanced on the officers, who were helping Hazard struggle to his feet. He was swaying, white-faced, and looked as if he might throw up.

“Get out now,” I shouted. “All of you. Now. Fuck protocol. Just get out. You can send two new officers in the morning. But right now, I want all of you clowns to just get the fuck out of here. Get out. Now.”

I was shaking so violently that I thought I heard myself stutter. Rafferty lingered, standing at a respectful distance from the door. I would deal with him later. Despite what I had just said, I knew that they couldn’t all leave.

“Clowns?” said the Joker, passing his good right hand through his hair.

I forced myself to sit down on a chair next to the gurney. My legs were still trembling.

“No, they weren’t funny,” I said.

“I can’t stand crying,” he said. “Could you not cry?”

“I’m not crying.”

“You’re crying.”

“I sometimes cry when I’m angry.”

I sighed and wiped my eyes with the back of my hand. “What do you think they were going to do to you?”

“It doesn't matter. He won’t be back. “

“I wonder how many regulations I just broke.”

“You were very, very impulsive. You didn’t have a plan before you came into the room, did you?”

I didn’t respond.

“Did you?”

“No. I didn’t.”

He turned his head and peered into my face. His eyes were sharp.

“You knew there was something wrong, you didn’t know what you’d find, but you came into the room on your own. You had nothing on you. Not a knife, not a pair of scissors. Not a needle. Nothing.” He shook his head. “Wasn’t that rash?”

“You’re right.” I said.

“You can do better, Harley.”

“It’s Dr. Quinzel to you, Mr. J.”

“Next time, think.” He tapped the side of his head with a long forefinger. “It’s important to know when you can’t afford to improvise. What do you think could have happened?”

I didn’t respond. It had already occurred to me that I was fortunate not to have had anything sharp on me. Maybe it was time to see someone again to discuss my medication. It wasn’t enough at the moment. I wondered how far I would have gone, given the chance, and what further potential for violence was coiled up inside me like a metal spring ready to rip through a soft mattress.

“You need to go to sleep,” I said at last, and got up.

“You need to be taught how to think, Harley Quinn.”

As I turned down the light I could see him smiling back at me in the dark, like a wolf. His eyes shone.

“You can trust me,” he said. “I won’t say anything.”

Then I left the room. When I was all the way down the corridor, I blew a kiss back in his direction. For the life of me, I had no idea why.

I wasn’t going to report the incident. It would be too much trouble and raised questions – as the Joker had pointed out – about the soundness of my judgement. I wasn’t concerned that he or any of the officers would say anything unless I did, so that was the end of the matter. It was also near the end of my shift.

Once home in the morning, I usually made myself read until I wound down and went to bed. I had attached cheap black paper blinds to the windows to shut out the winter daylight, and the steady drone of traffic outside helped lull me to sleep.

The light was golden, and I was crouching in the grass at the back yard of our old New Jersey house. The air was sweet and heavy with the smell of summer, and I heard my father calling me from inside the house. I scrambled up to go to him, and saw that my bare legs were the thin, scratched legs of a little girl.

“I’m coming, Daddy,” I called, and turned towards his voice and the house.

“Not that way, Harley. Over here.”

I heard a different voice, a more playful one, and turned towards it instead to face the dark trees that ran into the woods that started at the bottom of our garden. We were never allowed to go too near those woods alone, but there he was by himself, smiling, and I recognized him from the old scars on his face and the new scar on his forearm and from his long, strange-colored eyes and white skin. He held some red flowers in one hand, and beckoned to me with the other.

I looked down at my legs and no longer recognized them. They were now the legs of a woman, bleeding from several cuts to the thighs. The dark new blood ran down my shins and between my toes, and I held a knife in each hand.

“I thought I would find you here,” he said, once I reached him. “Not many people know these woods besides me.”

“They’ve always been here,” I said, puzzled. He threw back his head and laughed.

“But you have to be mad to come here,” he said.

“I’m not sure I’m mad,” I said.

“You will be,” he said. “So I brought these for you.”

He gave the flowers to me and took my hand in his, and I saw the blackness creeping up inside my arm from where his skin touched mine.

“What are you doing?” I asked. My head swam and my legs swayed beneath me.

“Ah,” he said. “I’m fixing you. Be patient.”

Then he bent his head towards me confidingly. “It’s a lot of work, fixing someone. Killing people is much easier. But I’m invested in you, Doc.”

He smiled down at me, and his eyes and mouth were even more beautiful than I had remembered. He raised his hands to the sides of my neck and pressed gently. His fingers were warm and soothing. His smile widened as he started to choke me, and I woke up when I tried to scream.


	3. The NIght Float - 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Two conversations about pain, and another unreported assault.

It was two thirty in the morning and very quiet. I knew that I was looking for an excuse to go and see him. It was fine, I told myself, because I would be off night float by the weekend, and everything would go back to normal. As a forensic patient, he was in any case the official responsibility of my attending. I would soon have other patients to deal with and spend most of the day between OR and rounding with one day down the street at the Briar clinic.

“Ah,” he said when he saw me. He didn’t seem surprised.

“No more nocturnal visits from any of Jim Gordon’s friends?”

He shook his head. “No, but one of Gordon’s direct reports dropped by earlier today.”

“Why do they want to talk to you so much?”

“I’m a very interesting man.”

“Sure you are.” I took a deep breath. “That’s why you have at least three officers with you at all times.”

“That’s just the GCPD being petty. They know they won’t be able to keep me for much longer than two or three more weeks. There's no case.” He gave me a sharp look. “If you want me to answer your questions, you’re going to have to answer some questions yourself.”

“That seems fair,” I said. “Why did that guy Hazard want to talk to you so badly last night?”

“Well, I’m here because Batman found me in the Narrows enjoying a cigarette next to two dead bodies. One of them was Hazard’s partner, who had been investigating a client of mine. Very unfortunate coincidence. People are killed all the time in the Narrows and most of the time it has nothing to do with me. My turn. Where are they keeping your father?”

“Up state, Conestoga. How did you know?”

“Is that your next question?”

I thought for a moment. “No. Do you often go walking in the Narrows?”

“Yes. I like walking better than driving. Keeps my hands free. You’re as bad as the police. Why’d you give up the gymnastics stuff? I heard you were very good.”

I felt a sour taste in my mouth. “I don’t know if I want to talk about that,” I said. To my surprise, he gave me a keen and not unsympathetic look. “Alright,” he said. “Here’s another one. You enjoyed hurting that guy last night. Why do you think that was?”

“I didn’t.”

“Don’t lie. I saw your face.”

I shrugged. “I’m not sure what you thought you saw.”

He raised his eyebrows. “I know what I saw,” he said.

I didn’t say anything.

“Do I have to spell it out for you?” he said. “Then I will. There are different ways you can look at pain. In a place like this, of course it’s something occupational. You measure it on a scale of one to ten, don’t you? Side effect, symptom, whatever’s going on, presumably it all has to be managed or medicated away. Now that’s a very one-dimensional approach.”

“No, it’s not,” I said.

He didn’t pause to listen to me. “But the reality is much more nuanced. No-one experiences pain in the same way. I’m sure you get patients who tell you everything is a ten, and people who say it’s a four even when they’re dying. And then there are the people who enjoy certain kinds of pain.” He looked at me.

He was correct about the wild inconsistencies in pain ratings, but that final comment put me on my guard. I tried to look directly back at him and couldn’t. “I’m not sure understand what you’re saying.”

“I think you do, but that’s not the point I’m making now. What I’m getting at is that if people experience pain so differently, it’s not surprising that their responses to inflicting pain are even more complex. You shouldn’t be ashamed if you found it cathartic or enjoyable or who knows what else. You looked like you were letting go and expressing yourself. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

I tried to smile. “Batman said you’d be a handful.”

He laughed. “You were having fun. What’s wrong with that? Pure, unadulterated fun. You looked utterly relieved, like you were doing something you’d been wanting to do for a while, maybe even run through in your head several times. It happened to you some time ago, didn’t it? Whatever it was that would have made you kill Hazard quite happily if you’d been able to and if he hadn’t got out of the room. You’re a vicious little thing under that white coat. What’s the problem with that?”

I felt my hands getting clammy and my heart rate picking up.

“I’m not sure we should continue this conversation.” I shook my head and stood up.

“Am I making you feel bad, Doc?”

“If I do, I deserve it. I shouldn’t be talking so much to you in the first place.” I shook my head again. “Policies. Boundaries. You’re making it difficult for me to check in on you.”

He laughed. “Come see me anytime,” he said. “You have so much potential. But I hope there’s something sharp in your pocket now. Lots of bad guys waiting out there for girls like you. Think about that, Harley. You might not be so safe yet. Perhaps we could talk about that.”

“It’s Dr. Quinzel,” I said.

I left the room without saying anything else, and walked as quickly as I could to the nearest bathroom to be on my own for a few moments. Had he really found out more about me than most people knew – you’re being paranoid, I told myself – or was he just playing a game of smoke and mirrors to unsettle me? I knew that I should report him. But I wasn’t going to do that, because he was far too intriguing. No-one else I knew could think like that. No-one I knew talked like that. 

He was still on my mind at the weekend, because now it was Kathy Parfitt’s turn to struggle with his mischief-making while I took the Metro to the end of the Green Line to meet Eli and Ben for the long drive to see Dad at Conestoga.

“I got the acceptance letter from Yale yesterday.” Ben let a tiny smirk appear on his face.

“You really do have problems.” I huddled myself further into an old blanket in the backseat. Eli’s little second-hand BMW was freezing cold. “Congratulations, Dad will be thrilled. Are you going to get a life now that all your admissions woes are over?”

“No.” He gave me a withering look.

“I’ll disown you if you turn up at Gotham Med in five years.” My phone buzzed, and I pounced on it. “See? I actually have a life.”

“No, you don’t. It’s your work. You’re such a doormat.”

“And you’re a soulless teenager with no dress sense.” I looked at the screen.

The only one of us who looked anything like Dad was Ben, whom he moved to hug first. If he was surprised to see Eli, he didn’t show it. He gave him a sharp look. “It’s been a while, Simon,” he said, using Eli’s first name, which almost no-one did.

“Yes,” my brother said softly. His hand moved, and then fell back again by his side. His face didn’t change.

“Your hair’s too long. You look more like your mother than your sister does.” My father’s voice cracked slightly, and he half stood up.

“I’ve always had her face,” said Eli.

“No-one has her face,” said my father. “Well, it’s good that you haven’t forgotten your old dad.” He sat down again, and no-one said anything.

The room we were in was bare, with tables and orange plastic chairs for visitors and inmates and not much else. The vending machines outside the room were for visitors only. The only thing that had changed significantly between visits to Dad over the last few years was his size. He had dropped over fifty pounds in prison.

We chatted in a desultory way about this and that, mainly about Ben and other small family news. Eli said very little until Dad asked unexpectedly: “It’s almost mom’s yahrzeit. What are you doing this year?”

“We always go to her grave,” Eli said. He looked like he was going to say something else, and then he said: “Maybe we should wait and go together. I think Mom would have liked that.”

“I like that,” my father said.

Ben smirked at me across the table. He knew that I felt left out.

Dad shook his head. “Not a day of my life I don’t still think about her. Tommy Elliott still remembers her from when she worked at the hospital, you know.”

I wrapped my arms around myself. “He sends his best and said to call him when you’re out.”

“He did? That’s nice. Real nice.”

“I’m off the night float now. I’ll be scrubbing in with him from next week.”

“You can still switch to family medicine, you know.”

“I don’t want to, Dad.”

“She lets them call her at the weekend,” said Ben.

“No, I don’t.”

“Do you?” Dad fixed me with his gimlet gaze, and I wilted.

“I answered a couple of basic questions via text. Everyone does it.”

“Everyone does not do it. Unless they’re on call.”

“It’s a public hospital. We’re strapped for resource. This patient – “

I paused, at a loss for words to describe the Joker, and had to start laughing. I wondered what he would make of my little family group and had to put a hand over my mouth to prevent the laughter from becoming uncontrollable.

“Are you alright, Harl?” asked Eli. He looked concerned.

“Oh, I’m fine,” I said. “I feel bad for Kathy. She’s back from a few days off. I’ve had almost a week of Mr. J., and she’ll just be getting to know him now.”

“So, let this Kathy deal with it,” said my father.

“She’s a third year, “I said. “I can’t exactly tell her to go away.”

I smoothed the fabric of the jeans covering my knees. I felt much better, as if I had shared a private joke with someone who wasn’t in the room, and it was time to change the subject now.

“It’s not important, Dad. I’d much rather hear how you’re doing.”

Much to my secret delight, Kathy Parfitt looked exhausted when I saw her on Monday before we started rounding. “How soon can we get the forensic admit out of here?” she asked. “I caught Julia Stanger sneaking him a phone at the weekend. God knows how he’s doing it to them.”

Thomas Elliott looked at us over his little round glasses. He was a blunt, snobbish, carelessly-dressed man adored by most of the residents and occasionally featured in ‘Gotham People’, much to his own disgust and thanks to his founding family status.

“It’ll probably be another week or two with the wound closure,” he said. “He’ll bend all the rules but don’t do anything unless it becomes physically dangerous. Let the police handle it. They deserve him. They’ll probably even make some money off him.”

He turned to me when no-one else was in earshot.

“I don’t think you should be seeing him at all. It’s a great learning experience, but he seems taken with you and that concerns me.”

I wrinkled my nose.

“Believe me, he’s one of the most dangerous people you’ll ever come across. Much more dangerous than me.” He touched me briefly on the shoulder, and the short, dry smile didn’t reach his eyes.

I shrugged. “Our friends the police are there to protect me.”

“Oh yes. Our friends the police.” His tone was as ironic as mine. “How’s your father?”

“He’s pretty good, thanks. He’ll be out soon. He knows I’ll be scrubbing in with you.”

“Terrible case. Harry was set up. Pure political theatre.”

“Yeah,” I said. As usual, I didn’t want to talk about it outside the family.

“Think about the suggestion. You should transfer him. We’ll be discussing the case again later anyway.”

“I’ll think about it,” I lied.

By late afternoon, the decision had been made for me.

Three days passed. I knew it was three, because I was resentful, restless, and grinding my tongue into my mouth daily in order not to show it. Wolff, not the most approachable attending at the best of times, mostly ignored me during rounding and OR didn’t offer much by way of distraction. I told myself that things were much healthier for me this way. I knew when I was out of my depth, and residency was demanding enough without a patient like J. to lead me on. I told myself that Dad was right: let other people deal with it.

But I was bored, and I missed him. It was like the feeling you have after you get off an especially terrifying rollercoaster, when part of you is screaming is to get back on and do it all over again and the rest of you knows that you’d probably pass out if you tried. I wanted to laugh at myself and couldn’t.

What the hell is the matter with me, I thought. Get over it, Harleen. No one has special relationships with patients, and least of all with ones like this. But I like him, whispered the other voice in my head, and I never asked to be protected from him. Well, tough luck, the first voice shot back, you need that protection whether you want it or not.

I was rattled enough by these mixed feelings to be thrown off balance when Wolff pulled me aside in the hall early one afternoon. His thin, dark features were contorted.

“I need you to deal with our resident criminal superstar today. One more minute of that freak, and I’ll be the one in police custody.”

“What’s happened now?”

“You don’t want to know. Go in there with someone else, manage whatever bullshit he comes up with next, and get out quickly. Pull in the police if you want to.”

The Joker was reading something when we came into his room later in the day but looked up and gave me a wide, spiteful smile. The nurse I was with, a sensible older woman, busied herself with a blood pressure cuff. I felt unaccountably happy.

“Did I frighten you off, Dr. Harley? I missed you.”

“What have you been doing to Dr. Wolff?”

“Nothing I can share with you. Patient-doctor confidentiality goes both ways, you know.”

I couldn’t help laughing.

“You should be taking this seriously. If you want to be discharged to Blackgate tomorrow, you’re pressing all the right buttons.”

“At least they don’t shackle you to the bed at Blackgate.” His eyes glittered.

“You know that’s not us,” I said. “You’re in police custody. It just happens to be in a hospital setting. We only get to make the medical decisions.”

“I’ll be out inside three weeks. They don’t have anything real on me.”

Then I heard myself saying: “I missed you too.”

Christmas was now approaching, and the hospital was cheerful with cards and tinsel. Some freakish accident - or not had toppled a huge tree in the Briar Clinic lobby directly into Dr. Wolff’s path. I heard that he had emerged more irate than alarmed, shaking plastic needles and shards of red glass out of his hair, but it could have been serious. Two days later, he slipped and fell in Mr. J’s room, skidding across the floor on an untethered IV pole and slamming into the wall. The on-duty nurse was profuse in his apologies.

“I’m so sorry, Dr. Wolff, something must have spilled there, let me take a look. Oh no, there goes the sharps bin. You’ll need some disinfectant for that.”

This at least was what Officer Stafford told me when he came looking for me. I threw him a dirty look.

“Has J. got you on the pay roll too?”

He shrugged. “You look like you have a few minutes.”

I marched into the room ahead of Stafford and pulled a chair up to the side of the bed. The room was so neat as to be impersonal but given that forensic patients were allowed almost nothing of their own that was hardly surprising. It smelled of disinfectant, and the walls were painted a non-descript light blue. The only surprise were some purple balloons bumping softly against the ceiling.

“Look, I’m not sure what you want this time, but I need to talk to you,” I said.

I sat with my back to Stafford, who lingered on the threshold.

“Please stop trying to maim Dr. Wolff,” I said between gritted teeth. “And please stop asking to see me instead of him all the time.”

“Why, when we get on so well with each other?”

“Because I need to pass this clinical rotation, and Wolff already hates me.”

“Oh yes?” He cocked his head. “I can talk to Tommy Elliott about that.”

“It’s nothing to do with you or Dr. Elliott,” I said, exasperated. “It’s the way the hospital system works.”

“Sweet pea, systems are there to be ignored, flexed, picked to pieces, or blown to bits. They only function as well as the people at the top allow them to.”

“Well, I don’t think this one is going to flex for you,” I said. I was losing my temper. “It’s a reputable residency program. No matter who you know or how many people whose arms you think you can twist.”

“When you talk to me like that, I want to slap you hard.”

“You fucking do that, and I’ll book you for assault.” I wasn’t whispering anymore.

He started to laugh, almost breathlessly. “I’m serious, Harley. It’s a compliment.”

“For the nth time, it’s Dr. Quinzel to you, Mr. J.”

His right hand shot out and clamped over my forearm. His eyes were shining, and I did my best to glare back into them but couldn’t. He dug his nails into my skin and grinned.

“You have a shiv up your sleeve,” I hissed. “I can feel it.”

“You know what a shiv is? Right, princess, your dad’s in jail. Are you going to bite me now? Or break my left arm again?”

“I’ll scream if you don’t let go.”

“You didn’t ask me to let you go, and you’d have screamed already if you wanted to scream. Do you like being hurt? Because you don’t look scared to me in the slightest.”

“You asshole.”

Stafford stepped into the room. “Is everything right, Doctor?”

Joker released my arm as suddenly as he had grabbed it.

“Oh yes,” I said, adjusting my coat as I got up to go.

“Is it?” J. started laughing again. I remembered what Batman had said about his unpredictability. Of course I should have been scared, but instead, I was only furious with him and with myself. I knew I should get away from him and stay away.

“Fuck you,” I mouthed at him.

I walked out, followed by his laughter and forcing myself not to look back. The crescent marks of his nails on my arm lasted for two days, and I went nowhere near his room again. He has problems with boundaries, I told Wolff when he asked why I refused point blank to help out again.

Wolff discharged him for transfer to Blackgate at the weekend. Two weeks later, much as he had predicted, he was out. I read the news online and felt empty.


	4. The Night Float - 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harley prefers her new knuckleduster to a nice, normal Jewish boyfriend.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a bridging chapter. It is structurally necessary, and also lays some ground for Part Three. However, if you hate healthcare politics and have a urgent need for bondage, sexual tension, henchmen, headaches and Mr. J, then skim through it to get to Part Two, 'Free Falling - 1', as fast as possible. I posted ‘em together.

The man sitting next to me on the train smiled and handed me the paper. “You can have it. I’m done.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I couldn’t help looking at the piece about Mercy, I work there. I mean, Wayne. It’s almost my stop now. Thanks anyway.”

“You guys gonna strike?”

I shrugged as I got up. “No idea. I stay out of the politics.”

“Nurse? Doctor? Somethin’ else?”

“Resident”, I said in my firmest, most cheerful voice and stepped away from him. As I turned to leave the carriage, I felt his eyes linger on me.

I wondered where J. was and what he was doing and was angry with myself for thinking about him again. The mid-January morning wind bit into my face and I told myself to think about something else. I ran the rest of the way to work as best I could over the thick grey cap of sludge that covered the sidewalk.

Scrambling into a seat at the top of the auditorium, I dropped my bags under one of the few empty seats left. This one was next to Bill Zahn, a fourth-year from Metropolis.

To my surprise, the grand rounds lecture hadn’t yet started. Dr. Elliot held out a hand.

“Many of you are wondering whether Bruce Wayne will kick me off the faculty by lunchtime,” he said. “After that email that went out, we’ll just have to wait and see. In the meantime, good morning. I am very happy to be here – to still be here” – a ripple of laughter went around the room – “with an old friend from Harvard…”

“What email is he talking about?”

Bill slid his phone across the desk to me without moving his eyes from the front of the room.

“I saw something in the papers about a strike over the new medical records system,” I said, also looking straight ahead. “Didn’t see the email.”

Elliot was still going through the usual lengthy speaker introduction.

“Yep,” said Bill, turning towards me. “They all hate Wayne’s guts. Real systems make it so much more difficult to keep up the cozy little corruption racket.” He put his phone back in his pocket and I noticed his long, muscular legs. Like me and so many others in the orthopedics program, he was probably a former jock. I wondered what sport he’d played and wanted to ask, but the lecture began.

“I heard you actually did an emergency fasciotomy,” he said to me when it was over.

“I only picked up the case on night float. Elliott and the team in OR had all the fun.” I wanted to change the subject. “Where do you think it’ll end, this showdown with Wayne?”

Bill smiled. “You really want to talk about that?”

“I did ask.”

“We need this to happen. It’s a cesspool here. Wayne will get what he wants, but not all of it and not right away. What do you think?”

I was somewhat abashed. “I don’t really have an opinion on the subject.”

Bill folded his arms and looked down at me. He’s cute, I thought, and smiled. I remembered something about him, something that Em Arruda had told me.

“You did an MBA with the MD, didn’t you?” I said, wrinkling my nose. “I don’t much like the admin side of things.”

“C’mon,” he said. “You have to have an opinion.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess I do. Fewer systems, more time with patients. I’m with Elliott on this one.”

His brows drew together, and his dark eyes were serious as he shook his head. He had a small silver earring in one ear. “Can I try to convince you otherwise over lunch?”

I grinned. Bill Zahn was exactly the kind of nice Jewish boy I should be spending time with.

“Sure. But if I’m not at the cafeteria by twelve thirty, don’t wait. I’m in surgery all morning.”

“This is important, Dr. Quinzel. I’m from Metropolis. We have a mission to redeem and bring hope. Just like Superman.”

“I’m warning you, Bill. I’m as stubborn as hell.” I grinned again and picked my things up. I was in a buoyant mood for the first time in weeks.

“Look at this crazy Op Ed,” Bill said over lunch. He pushed a grainy photocopy in my direction. “‘Gotham Without Doctors’? Seriously. “

I narrowed my eyes at him. “You’re a plant,” I said. “Bruce Wayne is paying you to brainwash us over lunch, isn’t he?”

“Nope. I could do with the cash, but I believe in this stuff. I actually look at what we bill for. Some of it’s freaking unbelievable.” He lowered his voice. “It’s fraud, Harleen. Elliott’s one of the worst.”

“No.”

“Yes.” Bill nodded. “Great surgeon, old family money, but doesn’t mean he isn’t after even more.”

I felt myself hunching up defensively.

“We don’t have to talk about him if you don’t want to,” he said, more gently. “The point is, medical fraud is a multi-billion-dollar gig. It wouldn’t surprise me if HSC and some of the Gotham crime syndicates are involved in what’s going on here.”

“I don’t get it.”

“HSC is all about discreet, high net worth banking. If you need a place to park funds without too many questions, HSC and Arkady Kurilenko could probably make it happen. Or possibly the Joker. Although people know so little about what that guy really does. He’s so visible and so opaque, it’s kind of brilliant.”

I sighed. “Bill, in five years, I’ll be a burned-out Fellow with at least two hundred thousand to go on my student loan, and you’ll be a Medical Director earning zillions.”

He laughed. “No, I won’t. I’ll be back in Metropolis in a nice private practice if someone here doesn’t kill me first. I re-attached some low-life’s finger last week. Guy was a gang member, I’m pretty sure. He had the Croc tattoos. Discreet, but they were there. It’s a teeth symbol, right?”

It took more time than usual to get home that evening, since we had to leave through side entrances to avoid demonstrators at the front of the building. They were a colorful lot, ranging from City Hall candidates and unions protesting potential job losses through to anarchists and the motley remains of Gotham’s Occupy Wall Street movement. Most were serious, some were plain nutso. Rumors were circulating that their more extreme elements could try to kidnap hospital staff or otherwise take us out of circulation to make the point that this would be how a huge, wasteful, Wayne-sponsored system would impact Gotham’s most important public hospital.

The elevator wasn’t working again, and as I stumbled over the threshold of my apartment, I almost fell over a small, rectangular package lying on the floor. I flipped on the light and scrambled for it. My hands started shaking as I upended it, and loosely-packed lavender-colored tissue drifted onto the carpet followed by the light thud of something small and heavy. I scooped the paper up and pressed my nose into it. A thick white card with spiky writing fell out.

I picked up the small, heavy thing and examined it. It was a beautiful piece, almost certainly illegal, consisting of four long, spiked silver rings that slipped comfortably onto my lower finger joints and rested just above the knuckles. The rings were joined to each other across a narrow band that ran over my palm, each ring rising to a point capped with a tiny, clear stone. I slipped it off and weighed it in my hand. There was something thrilling about how cold and substantial it was, and I loved it. I picked up the card and read it.

Good for headaches.

Something to keep with you and enjoy using on others.

\- J.  
  
---  
  
So he knew where I lived. I told myself that it meant nothing.

I bit the stones to see if they were real – I couldn’t tell, although Aunt Betty had once told me that fake gems would chip if you bit them - and I didn’t answer the phone when I saw Eli’s number. Eventually, I fell asleep in my clothes, still wearing the thing, opening and shutting my fist around it. It fit like it had been made for me.

I told myself that it was fine to take it to work, although the threats were mild at first and even silly. Rahul Arora was chased down the street by a disheveled old Occupy Wall Streeter roaring insults after him. Erin Rothman was held up by protestors when she forgot to enter via the side of the building. Things became more serious when two nurses didn’t show up for their shifts. Over forty-eight hours later, the GCPD had located them in an empty house in the Tricorner area following an anonymous phone call. They had been treated well, they said, and told that they would be released shortly, but had been kept blindfolded throughout and told to return to work with the message that this was only a taste of what would ensue if Bruce Wayne got his way with the new system.

More ‘flash kidnappings’, as they became known in the media, followed, and Elliott held an evening staff meeting to discuss the situation, which had become increasingly fraught.

“Clearly these guys are lunatics,” he said. “Fringe elements. The GCPD are onto them, and it’ll stop. But be careful. Go out in groups and stay away from trouble spots. And don’t for God’s sake talk to the press.“

“Yeah, let the medical mafia handle communications,” muttered Bill in my ear. “Guess who’s been leaking all the bullshit about how much Wayne Consulting would be paid for the system install. None of it’s true. My cousin -”

“Shh,” I hissed.

“But draw your own conclusions,” continued Elliott. “Why are these people angry? They’re telling us what they want. They might be crazy, and they might be doing it the wrong way, but maybe they’re doing it for the right reasons.” Scattered cheering broke out.

Bill’s arms were crossed over his scrubs, something that I knew by now indicated disapproval. “Bullshit,” he said audibly.

I said nothing and fingered the Joker’s present in my pocket. I had been seeing a lot of more of Bill and I could tell that he liked me, but he was strangely reticent about it. I also liked him, but I was worried. I didn’t date, and hadn’t for several years. It was better that way. The more real someone was, the less avoidable the issue of physical contact would be.

It had started way more than ten years ago, when Mom first became very sick. A hand on my shoulder, a hand on my neck, hands stretching my arms, hands stretching my legs, and then moving under my leotard.

“Let me adjust that for you, Harl. I’m so sorry about your Mom, sweetheart. You know I’ll look after you, right? You’re my best girl and we’re going to clean up at the nationals. Just relax now.”

For a while, I had wrestled my hang-ups under control and then they overwhelmed me again, when I snapped and smashed a pint glass over a woman’s head at university, shortly after my abrupt exit from the Gotham U. gymnastics squad. That was when I decided I needed to be back on medication. I had managed to scare even myself.

I decided to talk to Eli. It was bothering me more than it had ever done before. It was time to move on.

“Really? Do you think you’d lose it if he touched you? I thought you were over that.”

“I hope so.”

“Harl, listen to me. What’s the worst that could happen then? You go out, and it just doesn’t work. You’re right. You have to get over this.”

So when Bill, casually and very carefully, asked me if I wanted to go out with some friends of his one evening after work, I accepted. It was about ten thirty when we left the pub in Burnley, and the sidewalks were slippery. I almost fell as we walked over a dark spot on a small, nameless bridge near the Botanical Gardens and Bill took my left hand in his to steady me. Then he kept it and squeezed it lightly.

His hand felt pleasant enough through my glove, but there was something terribly wrong, and it was me. I tried to laugh, fighting the impulse to push him away. I took a deep breath and got myself under control. Bill does not deserve this, I told myself. This is me, and this is my problem, and I have to fight it. I cannot think about attacking perfectly nice people every time they try to get close to me.

I stopped walking and made myself focus on the distant rush of traffic from Otisburg out to the Trigate Bridge.

“Are you okay?” he asked. “Did you hurt yourself when you tripped?”

“I’m okay,” I managed to say.

He squeezed my hand again.

“You can be really prickly, you know. Your attending thinks you’re terrifying.”

“Well, that’s just great,” I said.

“What’s the matter, Harleen? Why do you want everyone to think you’re such a bitch? I, personally, don’t think you’re that bad.” His eyes twinkled. “Now please don’t kick me.”

“I honestly am,” I said. I tried to keep my voice light. “I’m a gold karat bitch.” I put my free hand in my coat pocket, pulled off my glove and slipped my fingers into my beautiful little knuckleduster. Good for headaches, I thought.

“I disagree. The nursing staff really like you. Did you know that?”

I said nothing.

“And I would really, really like to kiss you. You’re a sweetheart. No matter what you say.”

“Huh.”

He put his hands on my shoulders and I felt myself tense.

“It’s not that bad.”

He pressed his lips on mine and then stood back. I felt his tongue and didn’t respond.

“See? Not that bad.”

My face burnt, and I heard roaring in my ears as I stared straight ahead. It was all I could not to pull my hand out of my pocket and crack his head open. I saw J’s grin in my mind’s eye. Good for headaches, I thought again. To enjoy using on others.

I took a quick step away from Bill.

“Bill, I can’t do this,” I said. “I just can’t do this. It’s nothing to do with you.”

“Are you ok?”

“No. I’m not really ok.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“Not really.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way.”

I tried to laugh. “You’re a nice guy. I wish – oh fuck.”

“I’m listening.”

“I really like you, Bill. I really do. But I’m not okay about this. I thought maybe I would be. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t say sorry,” he said. “I just don’t know what to say. Wow. I feel horrible.”

“You shouldn’t,” I said. I squeezed one of his hands. I felt a bit better. I had failed, but I had at least been honest and not inflicted any physical damage.

“Can we talk about it another time?” he said. “I mean, I thought we really liked each other. You’re gorgeous and I know I’m not that bad either. I don’t get it.”

“I do really like you,” I said. “I do think you’re cute. I think you’re great. I don’t if there’s any point talking about it. Let’s just say I have issues with physical stuff.”

“Okay. I won’t ask.”

“No, it might not be such a smart idea to ask.”

“Well, whatever it is, it’s a total waste of you,” he said. For the first time, I saw him looking openly at my body. Even in the poor street lighting, his eyes looked hungry.

I took another step back. “I’m not sure I like that,” I said.

“What have I done now?”

“Well, I’m good for plenty of other things besides -“

“Oh my God. That’s not what I meant at all. You’re -”

“That’s pretty much exactly what you meant.”

“You just jump down people’s throats at the slightest provocation. It’s like you hear what you want, and off you go at a hundred miles an hour.”

Two white men, leaning against a UPS van parked on the corner on the opposite side of the bridge, looked up in interest and grinned.

I was angry. “Maybe there’s a good reason I jumped down your throat,” I said.

“Maybe there isn’t, Dr. Quinzel.”

“If you’re going to call me ‘doctor’ like that, then there definitely is.”

“Told you they were both from the hospital,” I heard one of the men say.

All the warning I had was the subdued sound of the snow crunching behind me and the mildly bewildered expression on Bill’s face. His mouth opened and made a small, protesting sound. That was the last thing I heard before two hands clamped around my waist and something soft dropped over my head.

I pulled my body away as sharply as I could, bringing my heavy right fist out of its pocket and striking out sideways and back. I felt it connect with something hard, heard a gurgling human noise, and then there was nothing.


	5. Free Falling - 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> High above Gotham City, the fun is just starting.

“All yours, boss” said the younger-sounding man with the reedy voice. “We tied her like you said. It worked good, but she puked.”

“Put her down on the table.”

I felt myself being lowered face-down onto a hard surface. My arms and legs were grasped firmly, and I heard the snapping sound of plastic ties. Something cold and hard closed around my wrists and ankles, and wide strap was passed around my waist. It all lasted only a few seconds.

“Roll her onto her side. Sit her up. Not so fast, she might pass out.”

I felt something being clipped onto the strap around my waist, and then a tug.

“Alright, that hood can come off now.”

He was the first thing that came into focus when I could see, standing with his arms folded across his chest and a questioning, almost pensive expression on his face. He wore narrow trousers, and an expensive-looking single-breasted jacket over an open-necked shirt. Very faint purple eyeshadow made the outfit seem even more austere.

“You,” I said. I had nothing else to say.

“Good,” he said, and nodded. “They did a fair job getting you here. You look fine.”

I opened my mouth and shut it again.

“Scared? Don’t be. No-one’s going to hurt you. Except for me, perhaps.” He laughed softly. “I’m joking. Guys – Frank, Smiley, what’s your name, Sully, isn’t it, we’re good. You can go now.”

I looked down at myself. My head swam briefly, and I had to shut my eyes. When I opened them again, I saw that I was wearing the same jeans and long-sleeved T-shirt that I had been wearing when I was talking to Bill. My watch and boots had been removed, and there were metal cuffs around my wrists and ankles. A short chain ran between the wrist cuffs, holding my hands together at the front of my body, and another short chain connected the cuffs around my ankles in the same way. The two sets of cuffs were linked by a longer chain that ran between them, held in place by a ring on a on a wide belt around my waist that was made of some tough, flexible material with metal rings of various sizes sewn into it at different points. A slim, heavy metal bracelet with a tiny red light was fitted tightly to my lower arm.

“Nothing to say, Harley? Not pleased to see me again?”

“Should I be?”

He sighed. “And there I was thinking you might want to get to know me better. I’m hurt.”

I tried to touch my fingers to my head and was stopped short by the chain. “What the fuck is going on?”

“It’s complicated,” he said. “Right now, the less you know, the better. But here’s what I can tell you.” He put a thumb under my chin and tilted my face up. “You were kidnapped by accident. That’s why I had ‘em bring you here. You could say you’re in my custody, although this doesn’t have much to do with me at all. Everything should work out fine. But you’ll have to listen to me.”

I shut my eyes. He smelled of cigarettes and something bitter-sweet and acrid like burnt wire, and I wanted to rest my forehead on his stomach and press my nose into his shirt to feel if he was as thin and hard as he looked, but I didn’t. Instead I said: “I don’t understand a thing. And I have a headache.”

“I’ll get you something for that.”

He took my arm and helped me off the table. My legs were sore, and my body ached. I took small steps forward, following him out of the room, which was very large, dusty, and mostly empty, with long glass windows running from floor to ceiling on two sides. It looked like the living room of an unfinished luxury penthouse and was so high above Gotham City that I could see the lights at the top of the HSC building.

“You’re going to be fine,” he said.

He put his hands on my elbows and kissed the top of my head, steering me backwards into a small room. It was bare, with only a narrow couch and a bookshelf that both looked like they were bolted to the floor, but at least it was reasonably clean. He sat me down on the couch.

“I’m going to have to lock you in,” he said. “There’s aspirin in the bathroom.”

“Are you leaving?”

“I have a lot of work to do. Ah, before I forget. Don’t try to remove that bracelet. It’ll blow your arm off.”

I looked down at it. The red light held steady, like a little eye looking back at me.

“Is anyone else here?” I asked.

“Yes. Don’t go getting any ideas, even if I’m not around. The bracelet is a tracking device.”

“I have no ideas at all right now.”

He smiled. “I can also use it to shock you.” He took something that looked like a small cellphone from the inside of his jacket and flicked its screen. I heard a buzz, and a tremor ran through my arm. I felt a jolt, and then my whole body jerked hard. I half-fell onto my side, my heart beating very fast, and he got onto his feet.

“That was the lowest voltage,” he said. “Be a good girl and it’ll stay that way. I’ll see you later.”

There was nothing that I wanted to think about right now in my disoriented state. My overriding feeling was one of discomfort. I needed to get rid of the pounding headache. If I couldn’t control my environment or what was happening to me, I could try to organize my thoughts. I was at least rational enough to realize that I was completely out of my depth.

After finding the aspirin he had referred to - which wasn’t aspirin, it was acetaminophen – I took as large a dose as I judged safe, turned off the room’s single light, and tried to lie down. The restraints didn’t make it easy, and I was cold. Eventually, I fell asleep curled up like a beetle, with my arms between my knees and my head cradled in the palms of my hands.

I slept like that for two, maybe three hours, and woke up suddenly, drenched with sweat, my stomach muscles clenched. I knew immediately where I was and remembered that this was the second night in a row that I hadn’t taken my medication. For the first time, I was worried about myself.

The door opened.

“You’re not asleep.” He lit a cigarette. “Come on out of there.”

“Are you going to tell me what the fuck is going on?”

“I’ll tell you a story. Alright?”

He tucked his hand into the crook of my elbow and led me out of the room. We sat down on a battered leather couch, and he slung an arm across the back of the seat, stretching his legs out in front of him.

“Once upon a time, there was a girl, let’s call her Peyton. About your age, and also very pretty. Tall, slim, big brown eyes, and full of Irish-American charm. Now, Miss P. had money, lots of it, but it was the wrong kind of money, the kind that _nice_ people don’t talk about.”

He took a drag on his cigarette. “Peyton’s daddy was a big Gotham City boss. And he wanted the best for his girl, although he hit her hard when she rebelled, which was unsurprisingly often, because she had inherited his famous temper. Now one day, the day when this story really begins, she went to one of those Gotham high society parties. An old school friend took her there. She didn’t want to go, she was too used to the cold nods and the tight, brief smiles people gave her before they quickly turned their heads away. But that was the night she met someone. Let’s call him Tommy, it’s a common enough name.”

He stopped and tapped the cigarette against the low table on which his legs were now resting.

“Shall I continue?”

“Please.”

“Now Tommy was many things that Peyton wasn’t. He was Gotham City royalty, you see, _right_ up there” – the cigarette swept outward to follow his words - “with the Waynes, the Kanes, the Crownes, and all that lot. And he had the looks and the brains to go with it too. But he was cold. Cold and snobbish and envious. Still is. Anyways, he accidentally spilled a drink over our heroine and she charmed him by cracking a corny joke about it and genuinely, really, having no idea at all who he was. They talked until after two a.m. and realized they had more in common than you’d think. And they soon became an item, to the shock and disapproval of pretty much everyone in Gotham City. And Peyton went head over heels for Tommy. That girl couldn’t do things in half measures. So when her Tommy had a concern that his sick mother would cut him out of her will, Peyton was only too happy to help him smother her with a pillow and tidy up the legal loose ends that remained.”

He paused. “What do you think, Harley?”

“I don’t know. What am I supposed to think? What’s this got to do with me?”

He put a finger on my lips. “Be patient,” he said. “What do you suppose Tommy did next?”

“I don’t know.”

“He left Peyton to travel round the world by himself with his mother’s money. It almost killed her.”

“That’s cold,” I said.

“Now, you know who Tommy is, and he’s why you’re here.”

“Are you Tommy?”

He sighed. “Really. I’m disappointed. How many men named Thomas do you know?”

“None.”

“You know Tommy Elliott.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“You’re lying.”

He raised his eyebrows.

“You think?”

I looked down at the short chain that ran between my wrist cuffs and tugged pointlessly on the cuffs several times before dropping my forehead down into my hands.

“No,” I said. “I guess it’s probably true.”

He put an arm around my back.

“Who do you think dragged you off the street?” he asked. “Elliott. No-one’s going to realize it’s him behind these flash kidnappings, of course. He’s trying to make Bruce Wayne look bad. Always envious. Always hated him. Stupid, if you ask me.”

I said nothing and realized I was breathing very quickly. I didn’t feel good.

“Elliott and my friends at HSC would much prefer Mr. Wayne to leave them alone. The business possibilities are so much more interesting for them that way. Their thugs just didn’t mean to pick you up of all people. Luckily, you had that little knuckleduster of mine on you and they had the good sense to realize where it came from.”

A wave of cold sweat and nausea swept over me. The room teetered like a wheel on a stick.

“Mr. J, I’m going to throw up,” I said.

I was weak when I came back from the bathroom but felt a bit better.

“I haven’t taken my medication for almost two days now,” I said. “I forgot to fill a prescription.”

“Well, that’s easy to fix. What do you need?”

“Something called olanzapine.”

He looked at me without any expression on his face. “Why?”

“Because I’ve been on it for a few years.”

“The answer is no,” he said.

“Who do you think you are? A psychiatrist?”

“You need to talk to someone about that little drug habit, Harley.”

“A low dose of a prescription medication is not a fucking drug habit.”

“You’re going to talk to a friend of mine about this. Don’t move.” He left the room, and I snapped.

“Just let me go,” I yelled.

I screamed, very loudly and deliberately. Then I screamed again. After a couple of minutes, he came back into the room.

“What do you think you’re doing?” His voice was silky, but his eyes bored straight through me.

I looked back at him and screamed again.

“You need to stop that right now.”

He kneeled in front of me and rested one hand on my thigh, leaning into my face and scanning it. His face was so close to mine that I could have kissed him.

“You want a reason to scream? Fine.” He sighed, pulled a cigarette out of his breast pocket and lit it with the flick of a silver lighter. He held it up to his mouth, took a drag, and without warning pressed the burning end into my forearm.

I screamed.

“I didn’t want to do that,” he said. He sounded like a teacher who had just given an extra homework assignment. “Don’t scream like that again. It’s annoying.”

“I won’t scream like that again,” I said, gritting my teeth.

“You’d better not. Next time it’ll be a knife. That scars worse.” He nodded. “Don’t want to look like me, do you?”

The man who eventually came into the room was tall, bearded, and perfectly bald. He was as neatly dressed as though he were conducting a mid-morning consult. I wondered whether he existed only as a figment of my imagination.

“My name’s Hugo Strange,” he said to me in a soft voice. “I’m a psychiatrist at GCU. I understand you’ve been on Zyprexa for some time. Do you want to tell me about it?”

None of what was happening seemed real anymore. I was sitting on a couch wearing transport restraints in the middle of the night, talking to a well-known university intellectual and host of the ‘Strange Things’ podcast. Either Joker had some heavy connections, or I was hallucinating some kind of therapy session. Whichever it was, there was no reason I shouldn’t answer Dr. Strange.

“I forgot to renew my prescription.”

“I see. How long have you been on it?”

“Four, maybe five years. I can’t remember. It helps with agitation and intrusive thoughts. ”

“That’s a long time for a beautiful, healthy young woman. Has anyone reviewed it recently?”

He sat down near me at the end of the couch, and I moved away from him and closer to J.

“Atypical antipsychotics can have some very unpleasant side-effects when they’re taken over the long-term. Maybe it’s time to think about coming off it, mm?”

“I’m only on five milligrams.”

“That’s great,” he said. “You’re almost there already. Look, why don’t you just stop taking it for a few days and see how it goes? I’ll give you klonopin to help you sleep and something for headaches and nausea, but chances are you’ll already feel much better after three to four days. If not, you can see me. We could talk about putting you on something else if you really need it.”

“He sleeps with his patients,” said Joker. “So you won’t be seeing him. But I don’t mind if you want a klonopin or two.”

“Why can’t you just let me go?” I asked.

“You heard what he said. You’ll be rather sick for the next three to four days.”

“I won’t be sick if you let me go home.”

“No need for that. Tommy Elliott is going to sign you off for several days. We’re going to have some fun.”

“Jack,” said the man.

“Don’t call me that.”

“You do need to call me if she can’t stop crying or says she’s feeling unstable or self-destructive.”

“He won’t,” I said, and started laughing.

I woke up on what felt like the fourth day feeling weak but clear-headed. The door of the room was open, and I padded out into the living room. I noticed that my feet were filthy.

He was sitting on the couch, working, but looked up and smiled at me. It was a real smile, although it drew out the mutilated corners of his mouth and bared his teeth in a way that was painful to see.

“Feeling better now?”

“A bit.”

“You ought to be grateful. Did you know that stuff can make you twitch uncontrollably when you take it long enough? Do you want to twitch all the time? Twitch, twitch? Like Smiley?”

“No,” I said, and sat down next to him.

He put an arm around my shoulders. I suddenly felt dizzy again and slumped sideways against him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The rig that Harley is tied up in is based on standard prisoner transport gear. You can buy it off Amazon but I did embellish it for fun. I'd like to think that the remote control/stun bracelet is entirely Joker's/my own invention, but I'm sure stuff like that exists already.
> 
> (My Joker likes plastic ties, chains, pallet wrap, belts with built-in rig anchor points and other off-the-shelf bondage gear. Traditional rope bondage is of no interest to him: he would never want to spend that much time focused on a single person, unless it were Batman. )


	6. Free Falling - 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mr. J. has a larger, more dangerous gift for Harley.

I spent the next day mostly on my own, sleeping, trying to read, and drinking tea with a lot of sugar in it. I was allowed to take a shower and change into a clean T-shirt and track pants that weren’t mine. Coming off a drug like olanzapine can be a bitch, even a relatively low dose of it. I was lucky that my reactions had been mainly physical: nausea, dizziness, night sweats, and wrenching stomach upsets. Although I was edgy and still felt far from well, I wasn’t tearful or anxious and certainly didn’t feel like harming myself. My head was clear, and I was taking in as much as I could of my surroundings.

Whatever kind of operation the Joker ran – and I didn’t ask - was disciplined. Except for Eddie Nashton, a serious red-headed kid who seemed to be some kind of computer programming wizard, the men who came and went were focused and hardly interacted with me. By now I could identify Edy Arias, dark and wiry, who never smiled at me, and Smiley, who had a facial tic and always did. Little Mo was huge, sweet, and probably brain damaged. There were others, some whose names I never caught, but when I shuffled into the living room that evening, J. was on his own. He was sitting cross-legged in an armchair that I hadn’t seen before in the room, and there was a very large wooden crate on the floor a few feet away from him.

The lights were dim, and his face was partly in shadow. At the other end of the room, the scuffed grey walls and exposed wooden floor boards gave way to a panoramic view of the city that framed him like a photograph.

“I brought you something,” he said.

I looked at him and said nothing.

“If you don’t like it, it can go back. But you will. Go on, open it.”

He prodded my lower leg with his foot, and I realized that the cuffs around my wrists and ankles had been released. I let them drop onto the floor and flexed my toes and fingers, making small circles with my arms and legs. I wanted to stretch, and knew that I shouldn’t attempt to do anything too quickly. My limbs were as gluey as warmed-over spaghetti.

I didn’t move in the direction of the crate. It looked like there might be a piece of furniture or even an animal inside it.

“I’m waiting, Harley,” he said. The little silver lighter was out of his pocket and he was balancing it between his right thumb and forefinger, moving it back and forth to catch the light. The expression on his face was serene and self-absorbed. I wondered what it would take to get him to burn me again.

“Why don’t you open it?” I asked him.

“I’ve gone to a lot of trouble already to get it here. You can open it yourself, or I’ll leave. Don’t be ungrateful.”

If I wanted him to stay, then I had no choice. I looked away from him and the view of the city, and flexed my toes and fingers once more.

Inside the crate, which took pliers and some assiduous tugging to open, there was a man on his back tied to a wooden vaulting horse, the kind you might find in an old school gym. A burlap bag covered his face. Heavy plastic sheeting was stapled to the walls of the crate and more plastic sheeting was spread over its floor. I felt something bump hard inside my chest, and I had to swallow.

“Old friend of yours,” said J. His eyes flickered over me. “Likes young girls.”

I walked around to the head of the horse, but I already knew what I would see when I lifted the bag. I spat at the man’s pouchy, unconscious face and let the bag drop back over it.

“How did you know?” I asked.

“You’re easy to read,” he said. “Eddie Nashton did some legwork and confirmed the details for me. Smart boy, Eddie.”

There was still so much press coverage from my pre-Olympic career that the investigation of the Aim High gym showed up quickly, Eddie told me later. Although the case had been sealed after its dismissal, that was a minor detail. Finding it in the first place had been more of a challenge given the tangle of incorrectly-catalogued data in the City Hall Court archives. From there, it was easy to draw a line to my Olympic meltdown and subsequently crashing out of the Gotham University gymnastics squad when they had hired him as a coach.

“What am I supposed to do with him?” I asked.

His eyebrows rose, and he flipped the little lighter neatly into the air and caught it before slipping it into a pocket.

“I’m surprised you’re asking me, Harley. This is someone you’ve spent far more time thinking about than I have. Come on now.”

I stepped away from the crate with my arms folded across my chest. I wanted to think, but I couldn’t. My mind was buzzing, and my mouth was as dry as lint. I licked my lips.

“Thinking about killing someone and actually doing it are two very different things, Mr. J,” I said at last. I tried to speak calmly, but I was dizzy. I could feel my whole body shaking slightly, and wrapped my arms more tightly around myself.

“It’s an unsettling experience for most people the first time. I’ll make sure you see it through.”

“How did you find him?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

I took a deep breath.

“I’ve thought about this so much, and now it doesn’t feel real. I don’t know if I can do it.”

He smiled at me and held out a hand.

“Of course you can do it. Don’t be so scared. All you have to do is acknowledge a few things about yourself, and you’ll be better off for it. So much less constrained. The way you look at the world will change. You’ll like it that way, I promise.”

He sighed, and something deep sparked in his eyes. “There’s nothing more creative than destruction, especially when it’s done in a way that makes no sense at all. But that point may take you some time to grasp.”

I wasn’t sure I understood everything he was saying, but I took his hand and held it to my cheek.

“Thank you,” I said.

J. sat back again. The spark was gone, and he never took his eyes off me. I no longer minded the smell of the cigarettes. They were familiar and reassuring and meant that he was nearby.

“I know about bones,” I said. “Do you have anything long and heavy? Like a crowbar?”

“Certainly.” He looked me over critically. “But you might prefer a bat or a mallet. It’ll be easier on your arms. And for God’s sake, put on gloves. They’re on the table.”

“I need knives.”

“He’ll be coming round any minute. You need a gag. I’ll tell you how it’s done, unless you’d like to hear him screaming.”

He was an excellent instructor, detailed, articulate and observant, interfering only once with what I was doing. I heard the chair scrape hard on the floor and he put an arm around me to pull me back from my work, taking away what I was holding in my right hand.

“Not like that. You don’t want to lose him to hypovolemic shock yet, do you?”

I was offended. “I think I know what I’m doing here,” I said. “He’ll die when I decide he dies.”

He shook his head.

“You don’t know what you’re doing”, he said. “Not like this. Ask if you’re not sure.”

Some time later, I had put my orthopedic and vascular knowledge to new and startling uses, and the man was dead. His right hand, both feet, and all the fingers on his left hand were lying somewhere beneath him in a tangle of plastic sheeting. A fine spray of blood covered the walls of the crate, the vaulting horse and the borrowed clothing that I wore, and I was exhausted.

“He’s gone,” I said.

“Very good.” Joker held out his arms. “Messy and emotional, but you did it. Come here.”

My legs were giving way, but I managed to totter to him and collapsed into his lap. The knife in my hand fell on the floor with a loud clatter. I was shaking.

“Be careful with that thing. You almost got my foot.”

He wrapped his arms around me, and I shut my eyes.

“The first time can be tough,” he said. “It gets better.” He rocked me back and forth, and I let my head rest just under his jaw, sliding my hands down to his waist.

“Ugh, your hair’s tickling me.”

“Sorry.” I sat up.

“And stop shaking.” He grabbed my upper arms, and pushed them hard into my ribs, pinning them there. “Does that help?”

“No. Not at all.”

He leaned back in the chair without letting go of me. Three buttons of his shirt were open, and his chest was waxy pale and almost hairless. I could make out the beginnings of a livid pink scar just above the fourth button, and I wanted to touch it. His eyes were half shut and malicious.

“What are you looking at?”

“You have a scar over there.”

“I have several scars over there.”

“Can I see?”

“Yes. If you stop shaking enough to take my shirt off.”

I didn’t take his shirt off, I just unbuttoned it. He was almost painfully thin and crisscrossed with scars, but I found the one that had caught my eye and ran a finger down it. I kissed it, hitched myself further up him, and kissed him again just below the collar-bone.

“Your hair’s still ticking me,” he said.

I moved my head to a different position. I wasn’t getting off him unless he picked me up and threw me to the floor.

“You won’t give up, will you.” He released one of my arms and twisted my hair round his fingers, yanking it back so hard that it brought tears to my eyes. He let go of my other arm and burst out laughing. “You’re a funny girl,” he said. “A cute little package of blonde and crazy. You could be terrifying, you know.”

I put my arms around his neck and tried to look at him in the eyes. “Really?”

“It would be hilarious,” he said. “So utterly unexpected.”

I wrinkled my nose and tried to shake my head but couldn’t because he still had a handful of my hair by the roots. He dug the fingers of his other hand so hard into my waist that it felt like he was trying to push them through me, and he bit me on the lower lip. I opened my mouth into his and moved my hands onto the back of his shoulders, leaning into him and almost crying with relief. He wouldn’t stop laughing and twisted away from me into the back of the chair, so I grabbed both sides of his shirt and used them to pull him towards me. That earned me a quick slap across the face, and I tried to slap him back.

“You’re funny, Harley, you really are,” he said. “Fighting is never a good idea. I’ve got a lot on my mind right now, and I’ll break your arm if I want to.”

I knew that was true, so I sat back with my hands on my knees and my eyes down.

“I’ll kiss you, but only if you calm down and stop creeping all over me like a spider. I don’t like it.”

“That does it,” I said, and clambered off his lap.

“I didn’t say you could go.”

“Well, I’m going.”

A well-placed kick sent me sprawling onto my back. He looked down at me with a little spiteful smile.

“You can go when I say you can go and not a moment before then.” He reached out with both arms and pulled me back onto his lap.

“There’s too much blood on you,” he said. “You need to take the shirt off.”

Then he kissed me properly, and he tasted of ash and of something acrid that I couldn’t identify that reminded me of burning alcohol. I told myself to keep still so that he could manipulate me easily, but I was shaking. I wanted to shut my eyes and wrap my arms and legs around him so badly that I could hardly stand it, but I kept my hands to myself and followed his lead instead. It’s a test, I remember thinking between illogical spurts of panic and confusion. He wants to see how far I’ll let him control me.

“Much better,” he said into my ear.

Then his phone rang from somewhere beneath the armchair. He reached for it, pushing me half off him, and looked at its screen. He shrugged.

“So much to do and so little time.”

He stood up and I fell off him. Then he left the room, whistling and buttoning up his shirt.

My knees were knocking together, and my face was burning. I looked for the last time at the spectacular mess I had left in the middle of the room and turned my back on it, walking over to the long glass windows that bounded one end of the space. I pressed first one cheek and then another onto them to cool down, although I was already shivering. The dark city glittered and writhed far below me, and I watched a golden-haired female blur with a small waist and rounded hips breathe a misty shape onto the surface of the glass and trace a little heart on it. I realized that I was watching myself.

“That’s me,” I said to my reflection. “That’s Harley Quinn. For what it’s worth to you, Mr. J.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, sloppy, sloppy research and writing. This would be so much stronger if I'd immersed myself in gory YouTube videos of operations and read a few anatomy texts. Shame on me for dodging my way around the challenge so that I could race ahead to the shippy, mildly sexy parts. I should be made to scrub the floor of the Batcave with Q-tips.


	7. Free Falling - 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> J. has a lot to do, and Harley won't sleep.

If I shut my eyes, I could pretend that I was at a hotel. The bed had a deep mattress, much better than my bed at home. The sheets were crisp and white, with that neutral smell that comes only from professional cleaning, and even the pillows were firm and impersonal. I was going to pretend that I was at the Marriott. My Boards were behind me, and I was several years down the road attending a conference. I was going to get up in the morning, have something stupidly expensive for breakfast, and spend the rest of the day drinking coffee and swapping inanities with other medical professionals.

I heard the locks on the door being released and lifted myself onto my elbows. It was him, dressed only in light-colored sweatpants and a sleeveless T-shirt. He didn’t turn the lights on in the room, but left the door open. A long narrow triangle illuminated the floor behind him and outlined him in yellow.

“Still awake,” he said. He sat on the end of the bed, crossing one leg over the opposite thigh. His feet were like his hands, long and elegant.

“Thank you,” I said. “It’s much more comfortable in here.”

He nodded. “You should go to sleep now that you’re calm,” he said. “There’s nothing else to do.”

“I’m still thinking about before.”

“It gets easier after the first time.”

“I don’t feel bad. I don’t feel anything. “

He put a hand over mine and I could feel the unusual warmth of his skin.

“Try to sleep.”

“J., are you planning to kill me? I just want to know.”

He looked puzzled. “I thought I told you already. No. I’ll rub your neck for you.”

He pushed me over to face away from him and I felt his fingers probing my neck. Two long, warm thumbs pressed delicately into my carotid arteries and I whipped my body around again.

“What are you doing?”

Much to my surprise, he held up both hands and gave me a disarming smile. “Alright, I won’t. You’ve had enough fun for one day.”

I collapsed in giggles.

““But it would have taken less than ten seconds", he said. "I think you’d have enjoyed me choking you.”

I sighed. Then I rolled onto my elbow, so I could take a good look at him.

He was so thin that his stomach was almost concave, but his shoulders were broad, and his arms were taut and sinewy. He was born to wear those ultra-fashionable skinny clothes that looked terrible on most men, but I decided that I preferred him like this, where I could see his bare skin and the long shoelace scar along his forearm that I felt almost belonged to me. I narrowed my eyes and tried to imagine how he must have been before those terrible scars, but couldn’t fix the image of a perfect face in my mind. This irregular version was better anyway.

I opened one eye. “Can I leave tomorrow?”

He gave me a sharp look.

“Are you not tired?”

“Not really.”

He sighed. “Can you dance?”

“Dance?”

“You were a gymnast, you must be able to dance.”

I grimaced. “Modern gymnastics has nothing much to do with dancing.”

His face fell comically.

“Oh, come _on_. You’re killing me here.”

I relented slightly.

“Well, I’m not very good.”

“What can you do?” His legs were folded on the bed now, with his chin resting on interlaced fingers.

“A bit of most things. My mom was a very good ballroom dancer.”

“Then let’s see if you can tango.”

I knew he was tall, and I could see now exactly how much taller than me he was. I tried to relax and follow his lead, but he was a better dancer than me, and I also knew that he could pull a knife or that little silver lighter on me at any moment. By now, I found the casual violence more endearing than terrifying - it was one of his idiosyncrasies, part of what made him who he was - yet it was also a good reason to remain in a state of high alert as we embraced in the formalized intimacy of tango. His hand rested between my shoulder blades, so warm that I could feel it through the fabric of my T-shirt.

“You should look at me,” he said.

“I can’t.”

“Sure you can.”

I felt myself flushing. I was already pressed so closely against him that I could feel his thin chest rising and falling evenly. It was so easy for him.

“I have to concentrate,” I said.

“Just follow me. Don’t think. You’re thinking too much again. About all the wrong things.”

“Where did you learn this?”

“In Buenos Aires.”

“You were in Argentina? When?”

“A while back,” he said, and I knew it would be a bad idea to press for an answer. Part of me didn’t care what the real answer was or that I knew virtually nothing about him while he knew far too much about me. What mattered was that I was moving with him, about as close up and personal as anyone could get.

“Look at me.”

It was an order this time, and I had a good idea of what might happen if I pushed back. I dragged my eyes unwillingly up to his face and focused on the area between his eyebrows. His fingers tightened their grip on mine and twisted them back hard.

“I said look at me.”

So I looked straight into his eyes. I had to stop moving, or I would have fallen over. He looked back at me without blinking and I felt like I was made of thin glass that would crack at any moment. His narrow eyes weren’t really purple but flecked with different blues and grays and unreadable. His grip on my fingers loosened and my hand moved further up his shoulder to steady myself. He put two fingers under my chin.

“What are you thinking?” he asked.

“I’m not thinking anything,” I said. “I can’t think like this.”

“Are you scared of me?”

“I think so. Yes.”

“Why?

“I feel like you can see right through me.”

“I didn’t expect you to say that. It’s a good answer.”

He touched the tip of his nose to mine.

“You’re not scared I’m going to hurt you?”

“You said you weren’t planning to kill me.” I sounded silly to myself, and had to giggle.

“No, I’m not.” His voice was regretful. “I wish you’d go to sleep. It would make things much easier. I have so many things to do tonight.”

He pulled me into him and wrapped an arm around my back. I laid my head against his chest and embraced him, shutting my eyes and shutting out the world. That was the only way I wanted to go to sleep tonight, I realized.

Then I heard him laugh.

“It’s getting late, Harley Quinn, and it’s got to be now or never. We’re ready for show time.”

There was a sharp prick in my arm, and my eyes flew open.

“What are you doing now, asshole?”

“Shh,” he said. “Shh, shh, keep still, Harley darly. Keep still for me.”

His arms tightened around me, holding me upright and in place. My head was swimming and I was smiling and smiling. There were stars in my eyes, the sky was full of purple diamonds, and he was the most wonderful thing of all.

“Count backwards with me, Harley. Ten – nine – eight -.” And nothing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's a short chapter because Harley is passed out. I feel like I cheated, so next chapter coming up very shortly.
> 
> It is perfectly reasonable to stab someone in the arm with a needle if you have tried every other means of getting them to sleep first, including a comfy new bed, reassuring them about their first murder, and offering to choke them. But traditional intravenous/inhaled anesthetics require more time to take effect, so Mr. J. used a small vial of highly illegal, plant-based stupefactant that was obtained from a tall, red-haired acquaintance of his called Pamela Isley. J. and Pammy don't like each other at all but are prepared to work together occasionally.


	8. Free Falling - 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harleen has been rescued. Now she needs saving.

I dragged myself out of bed and went to the session the next day out of a sense of obligation, not because I wanted to. It would have been easier to curl myself in a ball under the covers and disappear into the darkness that was weighing me down.

Strange cramps like hunger pangs hit me every so often and forced me to stop walking. I was numb and indifferent and all the emotion in me was concentrated in a tight band around my upper body, because I was disposable, something to be thrown out at night like garbage to serve the ends of a twisted piece of performance art. None of the people around me or the city noise seemed real as I trudged through the snow. I knew I should go into a shop to distract myself but panicked as I walked through the door at Neiman Marcus and had to turn around and get out of there.

I liked the therapist. Her name was Leland, Joan Leland. She was elegant, smooth-skinned with short hair and cute little gold earrings, maybe in her forties.

“Well,” she said. “I’ve seen some of what you’ve been through on TV. It looked pretty bad. We can talk about that if you want, or we can talk about anything else.”

“I feel weird,” I said after a long pause. “Just very sad.”

“Why do you think you’re sad?”

“I miss him so much,” I said. I couldn’t help it and started to cry, embarrassing, wracking sobs. “And I don’t know if I’ll ever see him again.”

“Who do you miss?” she asked patiently.

I was so startled that I stopped crying. “Him,” I said. “Him. Who else?”

“So let me make sure I understand what I think you’re saying. Someone ties you up and leave you on top of a building in the middle of the night. In the freezing cold. Wearing barely anything and attached to a bomb. And you miss him.”

“It’s not really like that.”

“Why?”

“He’s not like anyone you’ve ever met.”

She sighed and rolled her eyes. ”I would sure hope not, honey.”

I laughed. Her directness was refreshing.

“Harleen, how are you sleeping?”

“Not that much. It’s difficult to fall asleep.”

“Eating?”

“Not hungry. Not much. My stomach’s kind of upset.”

“Do you ever think about dying?”

I snorted. “Suicidal ideation? Not me.”

“That’s better. Thoughts of harming yourself?”

“You mean, like eating a whole pint of ice-cream?” I giggled. “Or cutting myself?”

“I think you know what I mean.”

“I don’t know. Now that you mention it, maybe I should try something along those lines. You know, shake it up a bit.”

I thought she would realize I was joking. Instead she looked directly at me. “Harleen, I’m worried about you. I’m going to put you on a low dose of something, and I want you to call me if you suddenly start feeling worse.”

There was silence between us for a few long moments.

“I want to go back to work. I think that’ll help.”

“I don’t think you’re ready. As one professional to another, you need more time.”

“What am I supposed to do with myself all day?” I started crying again.

“We’re out of time now, but maybe you can come in again in two days and we can talk about that.” Her eyes were as warm as coffee and anxious.

The days passed, and something was working because the feeling of numbness started to lift. Dr. Leland had me signed off sick for four weeks. It wasn’t a problem with work, but I called Wolff anyway because I felt that I should. He told me to take all the time that I needed; everyone knew what I’d been through. He told me to forget about the rooftop thing, that Gotham had a short memory and that no-one would remember my name or the color of my underwear from the GCTV video by the time I was back. I felt better just hearing that familiar sardonic voice with the noise of the hospital in the background.

I was seeing Dr. Leland once a week. I hung out at Starbucks in the morning studying and went to the gym in the afternoon. It was too solitary an existence, but I didn’t have many options. We’re not all Bruce Wayne with a vibrant social life and a huge bank account to lavish on it.

Early one evening around the third week of my sick leave, the phone rang. It was a male voice, rumbly and reassuring. It was Commissioner Jim Gordon.

I answered some courteous questions and arranged to see him the following day. There was no point in stalling because it would only get me into trouble. This was something I had to do and put behind me. I left a message on Dr. Leland’s phone, because I didn’t feel too good. I didn’t know what I was going to give away. The best I could do, I decided, was to show how scared I really felt and to say as little as possible.

Gordon’s office was relatively small and cluttered, full of papers and half-empty coffee mugs, disarmingly modest and down-at-heel. Gordon himself was a benign presence in a rumpled grey suit. His brown eyes twinkled at me over a wet mustache. He had arrived several minutes late, full of apologies and sweeping a late-afternoon flurry of early spring snow off himself.

“Dr. Quinzel,” he said. “I can hardly ask how you’re doing after what you’ve been through.”

“I’m looking forward to getting back to work,” I said. “Still wondering how long it’ll take people to forget that video.”

Gordon laughed and shook his head. “People have a short memory in this town,” he said. “Do you want to talk about what happened?”

“Not really,” I said. “I can’t even get it all straight in my head yet.”

“Did you know any of the people who were keeping you locked up?”

I picked my words carefully. “I wasn’t conscious when my colleague and I were separated. I spent long periods of time on my own when I was locked up. I was sick, and I didn’t know where I was. Somewhere in Gotham, I guess. I have no idea how I got to the roof where Batman picked me up. I don’t even remember that very clearly, only how cold it was and then someone lifting me. Commissioner Gordon, this isn’t something that’s easy to talk about.”

“If there’s anyone you’re scared of, we can put you in witness protection.”

“I don’t want to be in witness protection. I want to go back to work and forget about this. I’m not going to start my third year of residency on time as it is. It’s not good.” I took a tissue from the box on his desk and wiped my eyes.

“We could transfer you to another residency program.”

“I don’t want to go to another hospital.”

“Do you know what Batman thinks, Dr. Quinzel?”

I didn’t respond.

“He thinks we’ve lost you already.” The brown eyes were kind, but shrewd. “You admitted the Joker to Mercy a few months ago. Something went very wrong there, and he got under your skin. That’s the working hypothesis, at any rate. Batman thinks that there’s much more to this than meets the eye. What do you think?”

I noticed that Gordon still used the hospital’s old name. I shook my head. “I don’t know what to say, Commissioner.”

“We’re here to help, Harleen. If there’s anything you want to tell us, you can.”

“If Batman thinks I was involved in planning whatever happened to me,” I said, “I can assure you he’s flat-out wrong. I had no hand in any of this. Why would I want to do anything like this to myself? Do you think I’m crazy?”

“No-one is saying you did anything to manipulate us or the public,” he said. “Maybe I wasn’t clear. We’re concerned that you’re being manipulated.”

I stood up. “No, you’re not,” I said. “You just want a witness. Well, I’m not that person. I don’t think I’ve seen anything or anyone that you’d be interested in.”

Gordon didn’t speak for a few long seconds.

“I’m sorry if anything I said upset you,” he said. “I can see you’ve had a tough time of it. Think about what I said. Please call if you want to talk.”

“I’m still on sick leave, Commissioner Gordon,” I said. “This interview isn’t helping. If you don’t mind, I’d like to leave now.”

There was something subtly wrong when I got back to my building. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I tensed up the moment I got inside. It was a different kind of energy. The little elevator even smelled slightly different, but everything looked the same.

I saw him as soon as I opened the door, in an immaculate lavender-colored shirt that accentuated his narrowness, leaning into the arm of my couch with one hand dangling over it almost down to the floor. I couldn’t breathe and felt something warm and wet spreading inside my leggings, so I just stood there.

He might have been waiting for a while, because there were a few cigarettes stubbed out on the coffee table. He looked up at me. “Not what you expected, Harl?” He lit another cigarette.

I said stiffly: “You can’t smoke in this building.”

“Come here.”

I shook my head. Even if I had wanted to, I couldn’t move. A huge, hot wave of terror, attraction and anger swamped me. I tried to step forward and away from it and tripped over myself. The floor was welcome. It was cool, solid and where I belonged. I sat there and breathed.

The front door shut softly, and there he was standing over me.

“Look at me.”

“No.”

“What’s the matter?”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

“What’s the matter? What’s the matter?” I tried to yell, but my voice was hoarse and distorted. “You’re asking me what’s the matter?”

He shook his head. “Harley, I can’t read your mind. If you don’t tell me what’s wrong with you, I’m not going to waste time guessing.”

“You left me on top of a building. In my underwear in --- in --- minus whatever temperatures. With a bomb strapped to me. And you don’t know what the matter is.”

His brows came together, and he looked surprised. “But there was Batman,” he said. “I knew he’d find you. He always does. Besides, I made sure he would. That video was a dead giveaway.”

I was lost for a response.

“I could have died. And the whole of Gotham saw me like that.”

He grinned. “Whatever it takes to entertain my fellow citizens.”

“It’s not a joke.”

He put both hands on his heart and giggled. “It was pure ratings _gold._ You were gorgeous.”

“You’re an asshole.”

“Ask yourself why you’re really angry, Harley.” He crouched at my side and put one arm around me. His mouth was almost on my ear. I could smell him now, cigarette smoke, clean cotton, the faint, woody smell of some expensive cologne and underneath that all the warm chemical smell of his skin. My insides crawled with longing. “Is it because I left you there? There wasn’t a _chance_ you were going to die, and you know that.”

“You’re such an asshole.”

“Get up. You’re ruining my trousers.”

“No,” I said, like a stubborn child.

“That’s enough of this nonsense.” He easily hauled me to my feet and over to the couch.

“I’m not sitting down.”

“Why not?”

“Because you made me pee on myself.”

“No, really?” He whooped with laughter, bending over. “Oh Harley, Harley, this is so much better than I expected. I knew I had to see you again.”

Despite myself, my heart jumped.

“I can’t believe you wet yourself.”

“I was with the police today.”

“Oh, really?” The long, narrow eyes narrowed further with interest. “Do tell.”

“They wanted to talk to me. I didn’t tell them anything.”

His shrug was fluid. “Nothing to tell.”

“They think the whole thing was a scam and that I’m working for you.” I lowered my head.

“Poor Harley,” he said in a fake, syrupy voice. His hands circled my throat and squeezed lightly. “Not even one smile for me?”

“No. Go away.”

“You don’t really want me to go away.”

I shut my eyes. “I don’t want to see you again.” But I didn’t move.

“You’re so dishonest.”

“No,” I said again, and gave him a small push. “Go away. Get out.”

I could still hear his laughter as I shut the bedroom door behind me. Then he followed me in.

“I’m going to help you,” he said.

“Go away.”

“Take off those leggings”

“No.”

“You’ll be sorry if you don’t.”

“Fine. Make me sorry. Kill me. I’m so sick of waiting for you to do it.”

“You don’t talk to me like that.”

He grabbed the back of my hair, yanked me round to face him, and pushed me onto the bed, pinning me there with a sharp knee on each arm. I stared up at him.

“You’re still an asshole.”

“Don’t make me really angry.”

He put his cigarette out next to my arm on the bedspread and threw the butt to the floor. There was a knife in his hand, a wicked little blade no bigger than a butter knife.

“This thing here is called a stiletto. I’m going to cut those leggings off for you. Just like you cut my shirt off when you met me in the hospital. Such an unforgettable experience. And if you move, I’ll cut you too.”

I lay very still, too angry to feel as scared as I should. I watched him straddle my upper body and pull the thin waistband of my leggings outward, slashing through it and downward with the little blade.

“You really did wet yourself.” His eyes flicked over me and his tongue flickered over his lips.

“Then get off me.”

“Get into the shower and come back here.”

“No.”

I looked at his beautiful long mouth that ended in a horrific curving slash on each side, and I looked at his nose and the sharpness of his cheekbones and I looked at his wide, thin shoulders under the expensive shirt. I stared at him and said nothing. He stared back at me and smiled, with his lower lip caught between his teeth. Then he wiggled the fingers of his left hand. “Almost full strength now,” he said. “Want me to show you?”

I rolled my eyes. “I can get myself off, thanks,” I said.

His hand cracked across my face and my head snapped back in the opposite direction. I grunted and rolled with it, using my left leg to knee him in the ribs and try to knock him off me, but he only started laughing breathlessly.

“Oo, funny,” he said. "Funny girl. But you think I won’t hurt you if I feel like it?”

“I don’t care if you do,” I said. I managed to grab the lamp from my bedside table and brought it down as hard as I could on his shoulders. For a moment, I had the satisfaction of seeing a startled look in those strange, purplish eyes of his before he threw his head back, howled with laughter and collapsed the full weight of his body onto mine. He was much heavier than he looked. At last, he pushed himself up onto one elbow and looked at me. His eyes were wet from laughing.

“Fuck you, J.,” I said.

“That’s quite enough for now,” he said. “One more trick like that, Harley, and I’ll cut you with my little knife. It might not make me laugh so much next time.”

“You’re horrible,” I said.

He stroked my forehead with his thumbs. “You shouldn't come out with things like that,” he said. “You don't believe a word of what you're saying, and it makes you sound idiotic.” He took my face between his hands and pressed his mouth to mine, flicking his tongue over my lips before pulling back. He grinned, and I let my breath out sharply.

“I don’t want to know what a psychiatrist would say about you,” I said.

“No, you don’t.” He burst out laughing again and kissed my nose. I also started to laugh. Then I started to cry.

Afterwards, he lay between my legs, one of my feet hooked over his lower back.

“The police will be after me now to get you, won't they?” I asked.

“Nah. Not going to go anywhere, pumpkin.” He wound a piece of my hair around his finger and pulled.

“Ow.”

“I’ll send you a very good lawyer. You’ll sue Jim Gordon for re-traumatizing you, and the GCPD will be scared off. You’ll be far too expensive for them to pursue.”

“How will I pay this lawyer?”

“You won’t. He’s on a retainer.” 

“I could be struck off,” I said.

“Don’t be an idiot. Look at Tommy Elliott. Everyone who’s anyone knows what Tommy is and he still has his license. He’s also one of the best shots in the tri-state area. Bet he never told you that.”

“I’m not an Elliott, Mr. J.” I put my arms around his neck.

“Of course you’re not an Elliott,” he said, and tickled my cheek with the little knife. “We’re so much better than all those high society low-lives, aren’t we?”

“Huh.”

“You’ll see,” he said.

When I woke up in the middle of the night, he was gone, but he had left the little silver knuckleduster on the bedside table next to the remains of the lamp that I had smashed over his head earlier. I turned the light off and wrapped myself up again. The sheets still smelled of him, and I felt safe and happy for the first time in weeks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A smart person would leave the weird fluffy curtain in place and let everyone think that Ms. Masochist and Mr. Sadist live unhappily happily ever after. But I am not smart, and real life is far more interesting and awful. So there is still Part 3 to come after this.


	9. Endgame - 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> With Mr. J., you never know if you're getting ice-cream or broken furniture. Or other broken things.

After that, I saw J. regularly. In practice, that meant irregularly, unpredictably, and only when he wanted to see me, but frequently enough for me to be almost permanently wound up and anxious. I had no way of contacting him. It was important, he said, because the GCPD or the Bat family could already have hacked into my phone. I accepted the explanation. I knew that there were ways around such things, but if I challenged him about it I would get hurt or he might leave altogether, which would be much worse.

I went back to work and found excuses not to keep my appointments with Dr. Leland. Bill Zahn and I had hardly anything to say to each other, and he kept his distance, respectful but shocked. Like almost all the flash kidnapping targets, Bill had been released within three days, not much the worse for wear and with a nice little story to tell for it. On the other hand, my rooftop rescue by Batman had earned me the predictable nickname of the blonde bombshell and several lucrative interview offers, all of which I had turned down. The video that had been sent to GCTV had several million hits on youtube by now.

Much to the Joker’s amusement, the shock of an explosive device attached to a kidnapped hospital employee had also ended the infighting over Bruce Wayne’s new medical records system. Behind closed doors, a compromise was negotiated. The flash kidnappings stopped after a tight-lipped Wayne gave a joint press conference with Stav Klasko, Thomas Elliott and several other Board members, in which they outlined a revised approach and timelines for the system’s implementation.

All of that meant little to me beyond the fact that I was now scheduled to attend focus groups on patient intake processes. A few months ago that might have been interesting, but the world of Gotham Wayne was dim and unreal these days, and I felt increasingly detached from my patients and colleagues. The hospital was a place where I passed the time, often struggling to concentrate or warding off unexpected flashes of panic and confusion.

By now, I was on friendly terms with the various knives and other toys that J. kept on himself, and was less scared of them than I was of how I felt about him. The fact that he knocked me around wasn’t the problem. I was becoming used to that as a special form that our interaction took, an important way in which he paid attention to me. What terrified me was how much I was starting to depend on him, and how shaky I felt if I didn’t know when I would next see him, which was most of the time. It made me want to crawl into myself and disappear. The world outside work was shrinking to a place that existed only when he was there. It was a dark, lively place, somewhere that was full of surprises and never quite serious, but it could also be bizarre, unbalanced and impenetrable.

I once found him crouching in the bay window of my bedroom in the dark. I had come home late after an exhausting evening in surgery, damp with sweat and the warm night-time rain. He was shirtless, soaking wet and laughing soundlessly, almost as if he were in pain. His back and shoulders were covered in long, raised welts like scratches from a poisonous plant, and I knew better than to ask any questions.

“I’ll get you some disinfectant and a towel,” I said. 

He sneezed and asked if I had any antihistamines. Then he collapsed on the bed, laughing and shivering. 

“Ugh,” I said. “Looks like a whole greenhouse attacked you.”

“Maybe,” he said, without looking me in the eye.

I took care of him as best I could, and he was gone before morning.

Infrequently and without warning, he would fly into brief, terrible rages. It was impossible to predict what would set him off, but late one evening it was my inability to remember exactly who Matisse was that did it. I thought that he was going to throw me out of the window. Instead, he bent me forward over the peeling wooden window sill of my living room for a few long seconds, shook me several times, and then shoved me sideways onto the couch.

“You’re so ignorant,” he said between gritted teeth.

I lay there winded and wanting to cry, but I knew it would only make things worse.

“So I’ll go to the Crowne Foundation at the weekend and educate myself,” I said.

“We’re going there right now.”

It was after midnight, but the Crowne Foundation’s security systems were only a temporary obstacle to access and better still, its post-Impressionist collection had an excellent effect on Joker’s mood. On the way home, he put an arm around me and told me to buy every ice cream flavor that I could find at the all-night grocery store.

Compared with him, everyone was predictable, stupid, or boring. I sometimes found myself wondering what on earth he was doing with someone like me, and wasn’t sure I knew the answer. When that started to make me panic, I repeated to myself something that he often said to me: you think too much about the wrong things, Harley. I knew the rules: no questions and no nagging. Challenging him was pointless and dangerous, but something that I kept on coming back to if only to hang onto whatever shreds remained of the image I had once maintained of myself as some kind of sane, independent person.

“Why do you think I put up with you?” he asked me one morning. Unusually, he was still there and so were his clothes, draped neatly over a narrow wooden chair in my bedroom. He seemed to need so little rest and existed on such an irregular schedule that no matter where we were, he was almost always gone before my day started. 

“Because I let you sleep with me.” I was in a foul mood because I knew he would be leaving soon, and I turned away from him to the wall.

“Wrong. You make me sleep with you. Try again.” He tickled my back. I could tell he was happy, because he was trying to annoy me.

“I let you smoke here even though it might get me thrown out. Ugh.”

“No, I always disable the smoke detectors.”

I threw him a dirty look over my shoulder. “I thought so. You like me because I don’t ask you for anything.”

“That’s not bad.” He gave me the sharp, sideways look that always made my stomach turn somersaults. “Everyone makes demands when it comes to it. You try not to nag, it’s true, but you don’t always manage not to. What about you?”

“What makes you think I like you?” I rolled onto him and straddled his hips. “I don’t like you at all.”

He reached forward and yanked a piece of my hair very hard.

“Uff. No, I don’t like you at all.”

He pulled harder and I felt my hair tearing.

“Answer the question.”

“I think you're good-looking.”

He took his hand out of my hair and grabbed the soft skin between my navel and my hipbone, twisting it hard between his thumb and forefinger as if he were trying to break a piece off a stubborn bread roll. He grinned, and the uneven scar tissue that curved up from the corners of his mouth stretched almost as wide as my little finger in a couple of places. I wanted to stroke his face and didn’t.

“More,” he prompted.

My waist and hips were so bruised already that one more black mark wouldn’t matter. 

“You’re fun.”

“I could pull off one of your finger nails. Now that would be fun.”

“Could you please put my tweezers back?”

He let them clatter to the floor and slapped me moderately hard across the face.

“Don’t think you can relax for a moment with me.”

I wasn’t in the mood for this. It was time to get dressed and I scrambled off him. A long arm hooked me back and I sprawled onto my back across his body.

“You’re not going until I say you can.” 

I knew where this could end up, but today the upset, rebellious part of me wanted to fight back. I raised an elbow and drove it into his stomach. The strangled noise of surprise that came from him was gratifying, but his arm only clamped tighter around me.

“Let me go,” I said.

His chest moved under my shoulder. He was laughing even though he was still winded.

“I’m going to break one of your toes,” he said. 

The laughter was turning into high, whooping giggles. He looped his other arm around me to hold me in place, and sat up suddenly with me his lap. I could feel him getting hard under me while his right arm reached further around, pushing me into his chest and pinning my arms to my sides. His left hand reached for my bare foot. Thrashing, wriggling or screaming would only make him more excited and dangerous, so I went as limp as an old balloon.

“What, no more fight left in you, Harley?”

“I’m sorry. Could you let me go please?”

“Too late now.”

I felt a deep, wet bite on the skin between my neck and shoulder and smelled his hair, wanting to bury my face in it despite myself. His hand was already on my ankle. I counted to three in my head and threw all my weight sideways towards the edge of the bed, using my right shoulder to jab forcefully back and up into his collar bone. It worked. He grunted in pain and his grip loosened enough for me to tuck and roll onto the floor and handspring out of reach. I bolted for the bathroom and slammed the door behind me, locking it.

The door shook. 

“Come out of there, Harley.”

“I don’t want you to break my toe.”

He kicked the door and it rattled on its hinges.

“I said get out of there.”

I heard quick, scuffling noises and the movement of furniture. There was a loud thump and a splintering crash, and a chair smashed through the thin wood panel, followed by Joker. His forehead and knuckles were bleeding.

“Ridiculous cheap door,” he said. “What do you think you’re doing? Come back now.”

My heart was thumping. I didn’t want a fight in the bathroom, where he could easily smash my head against the tiling or even rip the sink out, and I realized that he’d now flipped into one of his incandescent rages where anything was possible. His eyes were black with fury.

I reached for a towel to help buffer any blows if he came at me with his fists. Stay calm, I told myself. Don’t panic and don’t hit out.

He took a couple of steps towards me. Swinging at him was out of the question and trying to run away again would only make things worse, so I opened my arms and reached out as if to embrace him. His hands snapped around my rib cage and he flung me over his shoulder with my head and upper body hanging half-way down his back. I offered no resistance.

Back in the bedroom, he dropped me face down onto the bed and placed a hand over my waist to restrain me, bending my leg back at the knee with his other hand around my ankle.

I felt a toe being pressed backwards and bit the sheet beneath me in anticipation. Then I felt a little crunch, my thigh muscle spasmed, and the pain roared through me. Red and yellow pinwheels spun behind my eyes and I don’t know if I screamed or just whimpered. I heard him breathing quickly and unevenly and then he lay down on his stomach next to me and put a hand on my shoulder. I didn’t look back at him. Neither of us moved. Then he got up and left. I heard him clattering around in the bathroom for a few minutes. When he came back, I was sitting up.

“I’ll need a boot,” I said. “I’m going to call ahead to Orthotics.”

He ignored me, kneeled down, and busied himself taping my fourth and third toe to each other.

“Try to stand.” He offered me a hand.

“Your head’s bleeding from that door.”

“It’s nothing. Here.” He hoisted me to my feet.

I tried to stand and then sat down again. It was barely six am and I was already spent.

“Are you scared, Harl?” He put his hand under my chin and tilted my face up.

“I don’t know,” I whispered.

“You should be,” he said. “I can’t help thinking about killing you. But I like you.”

I had tears in my eyes but had to laugh. “That’s another reason to put up with me,” I said.

He smiled down at me. His eyes were clear, his face relaxed now, almost tender, and I couldn’t look away from him. I reached up to wipe the blood from his forehead.

“No, it’s not another reason,” he said. “It’s what you said already. You try not to ask for much. You know how it is.”

“You're not okay,” I said. I wrapped my arms around his waist and laid my cheek on his stomach. I took a deep breath and started to cry. “You're really not okay, and I am in such deep shit.”

“Don’t cry,” he said. He rubbed the top of my head. “You know I hate crying.”

I tried to smile up at him. “Can’t you take something for it?”

“No, absolutely not,” he said. He moved his hands to my shoulders and smiled back at me.

I stood up on the tiptoes of my good foot to kiss him and pull him back onto the bed, and then we didn’t speak for a while. I was very late to work that day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have very mixed feelings about this third part. Part of me still wants to hit delete, like I've been doing to everything I've written since forever, but I'm trying to stop doing that.
> 
> So why the heck did I write this part? First, because I really needed a good explosion or two. Second, because I don't think there's ever a simple happily ever after, even in the healthiest of relationships. If I had stopped after the second part, I would feel dishonest. These two need to get more horrible and complex, and if they sometimes make you feel uncomfortable as well as move you, I'll have succeeded.
> 
> On a more wholesome note, our boy Nightwing will eventually turn up in this part. Batman has summoned him from Bludhaven because Tim is studying for finals and Damian is grounded for having hidden the Batcow in his bedroom. She escaped and managed to eat some valuable eighteenth-century wall coverings on the second floor of Wayne Manor. In other words, I'm going to need a reliable narrator to wrap things up.
> 
> And I posted early because the rest of my week sucks. And I am quite amazed and grateful and full of wonder that anyone has read this so far and left kudos. You have no freaking idea what a privilege it was to have entertained you, however briefly. You make me feel worthwhile.


	10. Endgame - 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Joker and Harley have an explosive double-date.

At least J. had broken my toe cleanly, and the boot was on for barely three weeks. I made little of the injury, and he never mentioned it. If I wanted to be around him, I told myself, it was one of those things I would have to accept. I adapted my exercise routine and took more care at night in my little tiled bathroom.

The Joker was intrigued by the miniscule silver devices on which we were now storing medical images and documents, and even more interested when I explained that Wayne Cyber Solutions encryption and a vibranium interior made them secure and virtually indestructible. He asked me if I could bring him a few to play with, so I removed some of the technology from the hospital for his use.

I had started to worry about him. He was as immaculately dressed as usual, but there were some careless details now about his appearance. Once it was a misbuttoned shirt and another time it was chipped nail varnish. Even the way he moved had become subtly awkward. He seemed more restless than usual, looking over his shoulder or moving his head at frequent intervals as if to shake something out of it. 

One night he was so abstracted that he let me hold him for a few minutes without pushing me away almost immediately as he usually would. He stared up at the ceiling in the dark, muttering with his hands behind his head.

"Do you know Black-Scholes, Harley?"

"Black holes?"

"Idiot," he said. "I can't think with you around." 

Then he got up and left.

My heart ached, not because of what he had said but because I was afraid. Eddie Nashton didn't want to talk about it and put his hands over his ears.

"It comes and goes," was all he would say. "In the end, even if it gets really bad, it always goes. That's the thing."

"Is what they say true? Is he -"

"He's the smartest, scariest dude I know, and we're done talking about this. Okay?"

About three weeks later, climbing into a car to go to dinner with him, I was relieved to see how utterly composed he looked. The green-streaked hair was slicked back and shining, and his narrow eyes held their usual expression of calm, malevolent humor. This isn't someone teetering on the edge of a breakdown, I told myself. This is the most brilliant, self-possessed, unusual person I'll ever meet and maybe, just maybe, I would run to the ends of the earth and back if he smiled nicely and asked me to do it for him.

He looked me over and laughed. “Well, you’re very department-store demure,” he said. “Next time, ask me what to wear. You don't have much dress sense, do you, cupcake?”

I bit the inside of my cheek. “Do you need me to change?”

“There isn’t time enough for that.” He laughed again and pinched my chin.

I turned my head away and looked out the window.

The car glided through downtown Gotham past GCPD headquarters, where the police vans lined up along the curb looked pinkish in the slanting evening light. J. waved to a few officers who were standing outside the building, and a couple of them waved back, not recognizing him.

“This joint has two Michelin stars,” J. said as we got out of the car. He tucked a few loose hairs behind my ear. “It was Arkady's idea to come here, not mine. Wouldn’t it be fun to blow it up?”

“Maybe,” I said shortly.

“What’s the matter with you now?”

“I used to like this dress," I said.

He smiled and took my hand again. He had a strange way of holding it, with his thumb and most of his hand encircling my hand and his index finger pointing over my palm and into the gap between my fingers. It wasn’t comfortable, especially when he walked quickly and pulled me along, and it allowed him to crush my fingers easily between his and hurt me if he wanted to.

I noticed Edy Arias outside, and someone else whom I thought looked familiar. Edy shot me a dirty look before making himself scarce, and I told myself to stop wondering what he was doing there.

“There they are. Let’s get this over with.”

I had also spotted the Kurilenkos at the bar, where everyone was pretending not to know who they were. We were about to present ourselves to Gotham City royalty, although J. knew them already. I perked up.

“She’s _beautiful_.”

“She’s a gold-digging, self-absorbed bitch. He should get someone to kill her but he won’t.”

Arkady Kurilenko was a big man, golden blonde with hazel, almost yellowish eyes, and he carried himself like a prince. He was taller than J., much heftier, and marked by the ravages of soft living. But Beatrice Kane Kurilenko was something else. I couldn’t help staring. The woman had to be at least six feet tall and was virtually flawless. She wore a simple, burgundy-colored shift dress and her shoulder-length brown hair was pushed back casually behind small, perfect ears. Her face was distant and contemptuous. I assumed that the last place she wanted to be was at dinner with her husband’s questionable associates.

“Pleased to meet you,” I said, and got a small nod in return. I decided it would be best not to speak to Queen Bea unless spoken to first.

Her husband looked at me. “I know you,” he said, stabbing a thick finger in my direction.

“Hospital,” I said. “I remember you coming to see him in the winter. I was one of his doctors.”

Arkady roared with laughter.

“What the hell … no, I’m not going to ask.,” he said. “I really don’t want to know.”

Like me, Beatrice didn’t say much over dinner, which we had in a small, private area overlooking the river. She checked her phone periodically, leaving the table once to talk to the au pair, she said. When she came back, the two men got up and moved out of earshot to continue their conversation and to smoke.

“Do you know why they’re here?" she asked me.

“Because we’re outside, I’m guessing. There’s less chance they’ll be overheard or bugged.”

“Yes, sure, but the specifics, sweetie. Do you know what they’re talking about?”

I didn’t answer, and Beatrice gave me a long look. Her eyes were deep brown, and it was difficult to tell if the expression in them was fury, indifference, or some strange combination of the two.

“How long have you known him?” she asked me.

“A few months,” I said.

“Feel safe around him?” This was spoken in a tone somewhere between vicious and neutral.

“You don’t?” I asked.

She shifted in her chair and looked over her shoulder. Her neck, like the rest of her, was light brown and perfect. It was hard to believe that she had two children.

“I want to know what they’re talking about,” she said. She pushed the table back. Her dress slid up slightly, and I could see her legs above the knees. They were as beautiful as the rest of her, and I wanted to touch them.

“Can’t help you there,” I said.

She looked at me skeptically. “Aren’t you at all interested?”

“He doesn’t tell me much, and I don’t ask.”

“Don’t you think you should know how he’s paying for that overpriced sorbet you’re about to eat?”

I pushed the plate away from me and stared into her face.

“He doesn’t pay for what I do, and sorbet isn’t a word I use. I say ice cream.”

She sniffed.

“You really should know what he does. Structured finance is huge in this city, most of it is dirty, and most of it runs through him one way or another. People like my husband are good, but he's in a class of his own.” She shrugged, and her mouth twisted in distaste.

“I don’t know what structured finance means,” I said. “Is there another word for it? Like sorbet and ice cream?”

“Let’s keep it easy for you and say money laundering.” She sounded impatient.

“Well, he’s a very meticulous person. I’m sure he gets great satisfaction from any activities related to cleaning things up.”

I leaned sideways and threw the whole plate of ice cream into the Gotham River. It wasn’t very sweet, and this queen of high society was doing her best to ruin it for me. The Joker was right. It was surprising that no-one had killed her yet.

“You’re not taking this seriously at all, are you?” she asked me.

“Would you prefer me to be outraged, or to burst into tears?”

She put her head to one side, considering what I had asked her.

“Neither,” she said slowly. “I hope it’s a very clever act you’re putting on, because you’ll end up floating along the Gotham River if it’s not. I don’t care that he and my husband both grew up in all kinds of revolting poverty that I really don’t need to know about, and I don’t care that they went to Princeton together, he’s still not allowed in the house. He’s extremely dangerous. You need to watch your step there, little Miss Ice Cream. And find out a bit more about what Jack really does, if you don't already know.”

“I’m sorry you dislike my Mr. J. so much,” I said.

A tear sparkled in one of her eyes, and she wiped it away furiously with a perfect, almond-shaped nail.

“You know what I really hate about him? He does it because he thinks it’s a scream. He doesn’t care about the money. He just likes to mess up the system and laugh at everyone because he thinks he’s so much smarter than they are. It’s a game for him. It’s a gigantic joke, and he doesn’t care how many people get burnt or killed along the way. He’s always been like that. Always. And now the Feds are after my husband, and God knows what they’re talking about over there.”

I wasn’t sure that I liked Beatrice Kane Kurilenko, but I did feel sorry for her. There was something desperate about badly she wanted information, as if knowledge could somehow forestall the inevitable. Still, she made me think.

We looked towards the river, where the sun was setting, leaving broad bloody smears across the water. I saw J. putting an arm round Kurilenko’s taller, bulkier frame as they stood by the railing above the water, and Kurilenko bend his head towards him and roar with laughter. We heard them laughing again as the gulls flapped and screeched high overhead. It sounded genuine and good-natured, two old friends sharing a private joke. Who knew what they were really talking about?

Before we left, J. handed Kurilenko a tiny silver rectangle that I recognized, despite the fact that its logo had been scratched out. The big, blonde man weighed it in his palm and slipped it into his pocket.

"Take care with that," J. told him. "It needs to stay on you."

"Everything's here?"

J. dipped his head in assent.

"Did you like her?" he asked me as we walked along the Finger river about half an hour afterwards. My hand was tucked inside his arm.

"No. She thinks I should find out more about what you do. I suppose Arkady tells her everything."

"I knew you wouldn't like her, and of course she's wrong."

"It's true that you don't tell me anything important."

"You know better than to ask." He reached over, giving my hand a quick squeeze. "Ark and that ex-debutante bitch of a wife of his will be clear of the place by now. We need to hurry."

We ran down the rest of the walkway along the Finger River and up the stairs to the Embankment bridge, a wide pedestrian crossing populated by a mix of lovers, tourists and citizens hurrying between different areas of Gotham’s entertainment and dining districts. One of the main train lines into Gotham Central ran behind it, lifted high into the air on a complex girding of wood and iron. The sky was dark blue and studded with its first stars as we leaned over the concrete parapet and looked back east. I felt a mild tremor, as if the train was approaching, and the ground beneath us shook. The air was filled with arcs of heat and light, and on the right bank of the river the restaurant that we had come from was illuminated with several sharp flashes. There was a deafening boom followed by a lesser boom.

J. sighed, and I felt his body relax behind mine. “A few dead bodies,” he said. “Hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of wine, and a significant insurance claim."

His hand was warm over mine, and he chuckled. My ears were still ringing but I started to laugh too.

“Look. It’s not over yet.” He pointed, and my eyes followed his finger. Masses of pale lavender balloons were floating slowly upward from the site of the explosion like identical silent ghosts as the world around us shattered into a cacophony of alarms and screams and sirens and people running in every direction.

“Beautiful,” I said, leaning my head back on his arm.

“Pretentious place. Putting salt on a perfectly good caramel pudding.” He put his other arm around my shoulders and rested his chin on my head.

“It’s perfect,” I said. The balloons continued to rise into the air, seemingly from the black surface of the river itself. I sighed and moved closer to him.

A news helicopter whirred into sight several hundred yards away from us. It tilted overhead and then sped off towards toward the flames and the noise down river. There were only a few people left on the bridge near us, most having scattered out of shock or respect and a handful moving to different vantage points closer to the scene of the disaster. We stood there in silence, enjoying the warm night air, the smell of fire and explosives and the cries and noises that came towards us on the breeze.

The powerful roar of a motorcycle interrupted my thoughts. A young man in a mask got off the bike, slinging it across the pedestrian walkway. He was cocky and graceful and wore two luminous blue staves across his back as well as something that I couldn’t identify in a holster at his side. There was something familiar about his physical confidence and the way he moved, and I wondered if he was a dancer or a gymnast like me.

“Nightwing,” said the Joker in his most affable voice. He held out a hand. “It’s been too long. Are the Robins grounded?"

The young man's mouth tightened. He gestured with his thumb to the direction he had come from.

“We want to ask you about that little performance up the river. Exactly the kind of show you would put on. You just came from there, didn’t you?”

"What fun. Interrogation games. I don't mind at all if your law-enforcing friends are as pretty as you are."

"Would you shut the fuck up, Joker?

“Of course,” said Joker. His smile was wide and inviting.

The young man's perfect profile swung in my direction.

“My God, is that a girl with you?”

J. said nothing, and raised his eyebrows.

"A real girl? Not one of your- "

“I believe so," said J., and his smile became even wider. "Is it terribly important?"

Nightwing looked like he wanted to throw up.

“Well, it's something different," he said at last. "It could matter."

"But it probably doesn't. You're just a prurient little bat-bitch, aren't you."

Nightwing shook his head, and bent over the handle bars of his motorbike. He looked towards the end of the bridge, and motioned towards a small group of police offers who were standing there.

There was a strange, sly look in the Joker's eyes, and I realized that his smile was all wrong. It was too sharp, too fixed, and I felt the fear that had nibbled at me these past few weeks bite hard into my throat. For a few seconds, I couldn't breathe. 

He put an arm around me again and pointed the other across the river to where the Bat Signal now blinked, huge, yellow and unremitting. His eyes were shining. I had always wanted him to look at me like that and now that it was happening, I realized that it wasn't what I wanted at all.

"Ah, the Bat family," he said. He rubbed one side of his face repeatedly, fingers kneading a long, silvery scar beneath his cheekbone. "I can hear the rest of them rustling out there just beyond my peripheral vision, but when I turn to see them, they're gone. The smallest one is the most vicious. Have you ever seen him? Dark green eyes behind that little mask of his. Looks kind of Arabic. A tiny bat brat. Can you hear them now?"

I shook my head. "I can't hear any bats, pudding."

"You know you'll have fight the bats with me if you stick around, Harlequin."

"Course I will."

"Can you really not hear them?" he asked. He sounded slightly incredulous, as he so often did when I failed to show knowledge of something that he considered rudimentary.

I remembered my non-conversation with Eddie. The rumors are true, I thought, and there is so much more wrong here than I can possibly understand, and I have no idea what I can do except to stay close and remain watchful. There was still a Harleen inside me who was telling me that to run, that I could talk to Commissioner Gordon or even to Nightwing, but she was a faint-voiced ghost compared with the reality of this violent, entrancing man whose fingers trailed from my shoulder. I didn't know if he was waiting for a response from me or not.

"Come," I said. "You have to talk to Nightwing and the police before we can leave."

I put my arm on his waist and steered him around.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> According to my head-cannon, Grayson is bi, mildly kinky and struggles with internalized homophobia. He thinks Bruce doesn't know, but of course he does. Feel free to disagree with me.
> 
> I wrote Beatrice Kane-Kurilenko (Queen Bea) to look somewhat like one of my co-workers, but my co-worker is lovely and highly intelligent as well as drop-dead gorgeous, which is kind of sickening. She is also far too nice to be a leading light of Gotham high society, which has become somewhat trashy and superficial since the death of Thomas and Martha Wayne. They lent it a certain gravitas and moral weight. These days it is mostly about money.
> 
> And I'm posting on Wednesday again. Because.


	11. Endgame - 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The bats are descending.

We were at my mother’s grave and my mind was somewhere else. Dad was doing well, after a small, unwelcome surge of publicity around the time of his release. He had already put on some weight, and Thomas Elliott was going to set him up with what he vaguely described as consulting work. I knew it was better not to ask too much.

It was a humid day, but I wrapped my arms around myself to keep warm. I hadn’t slept much that week and wore a light cardigan to hide fresh cuts and bruises on my arm. Eli shot me a concerned look and I smiled back at him and yawned. On the way back to the city, we stared at the road ahead for several minutes before anyone said anything. It was Eli who broke the silence. 

“Maybe you don’t want to hear this,” he said. “But I feel like you’re not over what happened in the winter. I mean, you’re not like yourself anymore. Did you know that even your voice sounds different? Are you still having sessions with, what’s her name, that Leland woman?”

I was shocked and a bit hurt. “I don’t think it’s that,” I said.

“Then what is it?”

“Don’t tell anyone,” I said. “I’m seeing someone.”

“You’re seeing someone? A guy? A girl?"

“A guy.”

“And you don’t want me to tell anyone? Why, is he married?”

I started to giggle. “God, no.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“He's not Jewish, and I don’t really want to talk about it.”

He shook his fair head. “I hope you know what you’re doing. Is he a nice guy at least?”

I put my hand over my mouth to stop the giggles from becoming uncontrollable. “I don’t know if you could say that exactly. He’s interesting. He’s a very interesting man.”

We drove on without talking for about twenty more miles until we hit the first of the traffic coming into Otisburg.

“You can drop me off anywhere here,” I said. “I’ll just get onto the GCT.”

J. seemed to have a number of places throughout the city, and he moved between them for reasons that were unclear to me and that I assumed related to restlessness and boredom more than anything else. I never knew what I was going to get when I was given a new address or driven to a different location, which was why I had a marginal preference for him turning up at my apartment in whatever bizarre circumstances. At least this place was a nice building in a good neighborhood. It even had a neat little private elevator with a code that let me off in a short, cold corridor that smelt strongly of paint. There was only one door in sight, a large wooden one, and I gave it a push.

The door was unlocked, which should have warned me that something was wrong. Unusually for J., the place was a mess. Its stripped wooden floor was covered in wiring, small plastic components and empty cardboard boxes, and piles of red and black casino chips overflowed from a couple of suitcases in a far corner of the room. A crushed ball of paper flew through the air from where he was seated, working at a long table covered in what looked like architectural blueprints. The ball hit me on the arm and I bent down to pick it up, unfolding it. It was a letter with some kind of official stamp on it.

“That’s a grand jury indictment, Harley Quinn,” he said.

My stomach tightened. “I’m not sure what that means. Could you go to jail?”

“Of course not. You can indict a cream donut in this town. Doesn’t mean a thing.” He pulled me towards him by the elbow and gave me an absent-minded bite on the ear. I dropped the crumpled indictment on the table. Presumably one of the lawyers would need to deal with it.

Joker didn’t look good. His eyes were moving around the room too much and he was tapping a bare foot on the floor. The sleeves of his shirt were pushed up and crumpled, and there was a light sheen of sweat on his face, which made his scars stand out even more than usual. He needed to wash his hair. I touched his cheek.

“Are you ok?”

“I’m fine. Arkady isn’t. He hired some moron from Harvard who can’t manage cross-border currency trading. Can you make more coffee?”

I felt his wrist. “Your pulse is all over the place. You shouldn’t have more coffee.”

He stretched his long arms behind his head. The fine cotton shirt showed streaks down the side.

“I shouldn’t smoke. I shouldn’t have more coffee. Just fucking make it.”

That surprised me, since he so often teased me about my swearing being the sign of a basic inability to express or control myself effectively.

“I’ve never told you not to smoke, pudding.”

“Oh yes you did. Said it wasn’t good for me.”

I pushed his hair back with my fingers and kissed his forehead. It was wet.

“Why are you trying to pick a fight with me?”

I should have been prepared for what happened next, but I wasn’t. He jerked me off my feet and flung me against the wall next to the table. The back of my head scraped the surface of the exposed brick and I tasted copper in my mouth. My nose started to bleed, and I heard Little Mo’s tuneless whistling upstairs stop suddenly.

“Just make the fucking coffee, Harley,” he said. His voice was almost plaintive.

The only thing I could say, with most of the wind knocked out of me, my top ridden half-way up my back, and a ring of pain starting around my eyebrows, was: “Why?”

“Because I said so.”

He sauntered over, laptop under one arm, and stared down at me. I saw that his shirt wasn’t tucked in. He’s not himself, I thought. I wanted to get up and put my arms around him, but I also thought that I might pass out or throw up, and in a small corner of my mind I wondered if I had concussion. He prodded me sharply under my ribs with his foot, but not hard, as if he were trying to roll me over or help me stand.

“Get up,” he said.

“I’m getting up.”

I grasped the chair that he had been sitting on, and pulled myself to my knees. Then I stood up slowly, flexing my toes to make sure I wasn’t going to fall over. I walked into the small kitchen at the other end of the room, and threw up into the sink. He followed me, with his laptop still under one arm, eyes reddish and roaming from side to side. He put his free arm around me. He smelled of sweat and cigarettes.

“There’s a bat on top of the microwave, Harl,” he said, pointing with his chin.

Uh-oh, I thought. “I can’t see any bat,” I said.

“Why’d you let it in?” He sounded disappointed. “You know I don’t like bats.”

“I don’t like bats either. Go sit down and I’ll bring you the coffee.”

He turned around and pointed his chin back into the living room, swaying.

“Too many bats now,” he said. “Look at ‘em. All over the place. Remember? I told you they'd be coming for us. He must be coming too, it was only a matter of time. You can make coffee for Batsy too.“ He giggled and took a few steps forward. "He'll take it black. What else? _Strong_ and black. No sugar and no sense of humor."

Then he tripped and fell over. I heard his head hit the floor, and he didn’t get up.

“Fuck,” I said. I raised my voice. “Fuck. Joker? Can you hear me?”

He was breathing and he had a pulse. I tried to roll him onto his side. As thin as he was, it wasn’t easy.

“Mo,” I yelled. “Are you up there? Give me a hand, someone.”

Mo was big and strong enough to turn him over without blinking an eyelid, but then again, Mo hardly ever blinked. Edy Arias appeared from nowhere and helped me push some cushions under J's legs. He glared at me. It hadn’t taken long for me to figure out that Edy disliked me almost as intensely as he adored J.

“What you done to him, Harley?” he asked.

“More like what’s he done to himself,” I snapped. “He tripped and fell. God knows when he’s last slept.”

“You pushed him?”

I stuck my tongue out and kept my fingers on J.’s wrist. At just under a minute, he opened his eyes and made a face.

“You need to see a doctor,” I said.

Edy rolled his eyes and muttered something in Spanish.

“You’re a doctor,” said J. “Edy, Mo, give me a hand. That’s it.” He shuffled to a semi-upright position. “Get out, both of you. I need to talk to her.”

Edy muttered a few more words, sounding like he was trying to spit something disgusting out of his mouth, and the men left the room. I was still half-sitting on the floor, and leaned my arms on the edge of the couch, letting my chin drop into my linked fingers as he sat himself down.

“Don’t look at me like that. I know what happened.”

“Then you know you should be in hospital.”

He gave me a sharp look. He had bent his knees up in front of him, and I assumed he was beyond caring what he was doing to the creases in his trousers.

"If you want to help out, you need to listen," he said.

"Arkham's supposed to be a good place," I said.

"No. They'd put me on ninety-day psychiatric hold. Or have me declared incompetent and turn me into some lumbering, drug-dependent zombie like Bane." He shook his head. "I'd have to bribe and threaten my way out of there, which is a waste of time and money. Especially at the moment."

"They might actually be able to help you."

He threw back his head and roared with laughter. His hair fell across his face, and he pushed it back with one hand.

"I don't think you're listening yet. Arkham isn't about helping people like me. I don't want those doctors and I don't need them." He stretched out his hand to make a slow, strangling motion. "I won't be labeled or medicated or monitored. I intend to stay just the way I am."

He put his head to one side, and surveyed me with eyes as bright and challenging as a bird's.

"Did you know that in some cultures transience and lack of symmetry are considered beautiful? No, of course you didn't. For a bright girl, you don't read nearly enough. Now, I'm all about chaos. Chaos and imbalance. So long as I'm here - " he pointed to himself with one long finger, and I noticed how grimy the nail was, how unlike his usual self - "no-one will forget that death could be waiting for them just around the corner. And the filthy air of this city will smell like lilacs to them so long as they're still breathing it in. And they won't catch me. Because whatever's going on in here - " he tapped the side of his head - " I'll always be smarter than those poor visionless creatures. They need to be frightened into remembering that they can't control everything. They need to be made to acknowledge their own limits."

His syntax was correct enough, but I wondered if he was raving. I understood very little of what he was saying, and what I could make sense of seemed grandiose and outlandish. I decided not to say anything.

"You do lack breadth, little Harlequin. Never mind. Only Batman would really grasp what I'm saying. And of course he'd disagree, because he's bound to." He chuckled, and shook his head. His voice became reflective. "I had a crush on someone like him at Princeton," he said. "Tall, dark and unattainable. Everything you're not. His name was Bruce. Unlike me, Brucey came from the right side of the tracks. Very much so."

I drew my eyebrows together and looked at him.

"Don't be jealous," he said.

"I'm not jealous."

"We'll go out and kill some people together soon, just me and you, and I'll show you a fun time. Alright?"

"I'm worried about you."

He turned his upper body towards me, and I felt obscenely healthy and ordinary in contrast with that mesmerizing, sharp-boned face. Once again, I couldn't help staring and wondering what he was doing with me.

"You need to get this very clear," he said. He leaned further forward and grabbed me by the throat, peering into my eyes. I heard his voice, calm and reasonable, as my field of vision swung back and forth like a pendulum.

"This is not a good way to help, Harley. It is _not_ endearing, and it is incredibly annoying. Try to interfere with my work or trick me into going to hospital” – he waved his other hand dismissively – “yes, I know you can be very clever in your own way – and I’ll twist off all your fingers and push 'em into you. And then we'll light 'em up one by on, just like little candles on a birthday cake, and let Edy Arias decide whether he's going to blow 'em out or push 'em all the way up inside you as far as he can make 'em go. Do we understand each other?"

I was wheezing so hard that it sounded like another woman was speaking at the same time as I was.

"Yes, Mr. J."

"Good girl. I thought you would."

He let go of me, and I slumped to the floor. My nose started to bleed again, and I reached for a box of tissues on a small table next to the couch.

“Come on,” he said at last. “ It makes no sense to worry about me. I don't harm myself. I only hurt other people. You know that. D'you really think I'm some kind of run-of-the-mill self-mutilating, depressive, personality-disordered-schizophrenic-whatever who has to be kept away from the medicine cabinet and the kitchen knives?" 

I snorted loudly, which set off the bleeding again, and he looked down at me. 

"Really, Harley, you're hurting my feelings."

"What feelings?" I said indistinctly from behind a mass of tissue.

"I'm exceptional, and you're implying that I'm not. Your concern would be better directed towards someone more common and less competent, like Arkady, for example, who's probably going to have to leave the country soon."

He touched his nose to mine and wiggled his eyebrows. 

"I'm really not normal," he said.

He now had specks of my blood in his hair and dotted across his cheekbones, and I couldn’t hold the hysterical giggles in any longer. He started to giggle too. We looked into each other’s eyes and giggled for a few seconds.

“What do you think, Harl? Feel better now?”

I stifled a giggle and a hiccup, and coughed up a small chunk of blood.

“I guess so,” I said. 

“Make me a sandwich?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know that the Joker's mental health jokes are in terrible taste and I'm sorry if he offended anyone. He is an atrocious person, even if he wears Hedi Slimane and Paul Smith better than most people do.
> 
> Having said that, there is a great deal of truth behind what he is saying. Statistically, people with severe mental health issues are far likelier to hurt or kill themselves than to hurt or kill others. I knew this to be true anecdotally, but had to go dig up the facts in the unlikely event that anyone would ever bother reading this. So here you have it: studies by different authors in the UK and the US come up with estimates for homicides committed by the mentally ill that range from a low of 5% (UK, 2009) to a high of around 15% (US, 2015, potential co-occurrence with substance abuse). 
> 
> Why am I ranting on about this? I guess because even though it's so much fun to write, I'm still pretty uncomfortable with the whole crazy criminal trope. It's destructive and inaccurate. Next time you see a movie, read a book (or a fic) or come across any media that equates criminality with mental illness, remind yourself that in real life, those offenders who meet the definition of legally insane as well as the true psychopaths are in fact pretty darn rare. 
> 
> Rant over.
> 
> Apologies for posting so late. Unexpectedly, I had no Internet access all of last week. Next week, I'll be posting the remainder of this story.


	12. Endgame - 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> More explosions, massive property damage, and a happy, happy ending in which Harley finds an effective way of expressing her displeasure at the Joker's deep-seated mistrust of almost everyone who is not him.

The sun was rising by the time I picked up the bicycle, and the sky was washed a delicate lemony blue. It would be a beautiful day and it was a pity that I would probably need to go back to bed for a few hours once my errand was done.

J. had summoned me at about four in the morning to a drab apartment at an address near the Little Kiev area of town. I had tumbled out of bed into leggings and a clean exercise top, pulling my hair back with a wide band. It was still cool, and the sun wouldn’t be up for about an hour. They had been waiting for me, the Joker his element, wide awake and leaning against a wall of peeling paint with his hands in his pockets.

“Thank you for coming, Harley,” said Kurilenko. He looked tired and uncomfortable, but crinkled his eyes at me and made a wide, choppy gesture with one of his big hands. “This is not up to the same standard as my usual place of business, sorry. They don’t let me in there anymore.”

“He left his special flash drive at the office,” said J. “After all the trouble I went to. You’re going to pick it up for him before the Feds get there in a few hours. Here’s a phone and a security pass. Smiley will meet you at fourth and Capullo. You know where the building is. You’ll cycle there.”

“Yes,” I said.

“You’ll fit right in. Plenty of shiny-faced, twenty-something year old morons who come in at the crack of dawn before spinning class.”

“Right.” Kurilenko looked glum. “It’s an investment bank. No-one’s going to ask you anything.”

With so many buildings vying for light and space, the sun became a faint memory high above the central grid of Gotham’s financial district. Rearing fifty-seven floors into the sky like an upended submarine, the black glass of the HSC tower overshadowed everything in its vicinity, casting the sidewalk that ran along its side into darkness. As I turned the corner I was dazzled by the sun that hit my eyes from the open construction lot next to it. That would have to be the new HSC annex and shopping center, I thought, worth several million dollars of new construction and over a thousand jobs.

I noticed an enormous tower crane extending from the roof of the existing building over the skeleton of the emerging structure and wondered for a few seconds how they had levered the thing into place. Then I focused on the task at hand.

“You’ll take the second bank of elevators on the right to the fifty sixth floor,” he had told me. “Then you’ll call, and he’ll talk you to his office.”

He had turned to Kurilenko. “She’ll work out better than anyone else we have.”

Kurilenko had shot him a look. “You know that wasn’t what I was thinking.”

“Ah, and look what I have for you when you’re done.”

He had given me a charming, lopsided grin and shown me a little pistol inside his jacket. I was pleased because I had wanted to learn how to use a firearm for some time now. I didn’t like them much, but they were indispensable.

Kurilenko had shot him another filthy look, and I wondered what else was going on.

I took one last look at the tower crane and the complex structure of girders rising towards it from the adjacent site. When I was sure that my mind was clear of everything else, I headed for the front doors of the building.

Kurilenko was right. The guards at the front desk barely glanced up as I swiped in. It wasn’t yet six, but a curly-haired young man in chinos was already waiting at the elevators, hollow-eyed, a large cup of coffee in his hand, lap top case slung over his shoulder. The fifty sixth floor was quiet, with a few isolated heads at desks here and there, mainly men. None of them looked up. They were all young and clean-cut, mostly white.

I jogged down the hall, and about ten minutes later, to the sound of J. swearing softly at Arkady in the background, I had finally located the little drive on the floor, partly stuck beneath the pot of an exuberant philodendron.

“Cleaners, huh,” I said, scooping it up.

I heard J’s voice. “Get to the roof now and a drone will take that off you. You don’t want -”

A crackle over my head cut him off and three short, deafening beeps over the intercom system made me jump. An alarm wailed through the building and stopped as suddenly as it had started up.

“This is the Federal Bureau of Investigations. All HSC employees and other onsite personnel – “

Through the noise, I heard J in my ear again. His voice was as level as if he were ordering Chinese takeout. “Get to the roof,” he said. “Get the drive out of there. Through the nearest fire exit. Now.”

I didn’t pause to listen to the rest of the announcement or to wait for any further instructions. I shoved the drive into my bra, pushed the door open and sprinted. I didn’t think, I moved. It was only a short way up to the top floor of the building and from there onto the roof. Kicking the door open, I emerged into brilliant sunshine. With the light directly in my eyes, it took a few long seconds to locate one of Edy’s drones hovering about four feet above the ground near the base of the tower crane that I had seen from below. The ground around the base was scattered with building debris, and I stepped carefully over it, looking upward to confirm that the cab of the crane was empty.

I could hear Kurilenko’s voice clearly now.

“Give her more time to get out.”

“No,” said J. “They’re inside now. You can’t afford to wait.”

“Three or four minutes. She could get to the fiftieth floor. There’s a bridge across the street to the Dominion building.”

I smelled a rat. “What are you doing, J.?”

“Hurry up, cupcake. I need that flash drive.”

I reached for the flimsy little black craft.

“You’re not keeping that pistol for me. You’re going to blow up this building with me on top of it, aren’t you?”

“Let the drone go. We’ll talk about this later. Alright?”

“Asshole.”

I snapped one of drone’s wings off and then its tail and threw the rest of it off the top of the building after stuffing the little drive back into my bra. I was so angry that I had no room to be scared, and looked all around myself, knowing there were only minutes if not seconds to decide on a course of action. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion. I was as calm as I had ever been in my life, but also primed to kick anyone off the roof if they came out after me while I weighed my options.

A run down to the fiftieth floor was out of the question. The Feds would be all over the building by now, I wasn’t familiar with the floor layout, and it was more than likely that J. would override his buddy’s suggestion of giving me more time to get clear. He had known all along that this could happen, the untrusting asshole. I had a much better idea now what those dirty looks of Kurilenko’s had been about.

The crane was my only option, exposed as it was, and I would have to scramble. I swung myself up and onto it, grateful that I was wearing gloves because of the harshness of the metal under my hands. I could feel its snags even through the protective fabric that covered my palms. This is easy, I told myself. Easier than the uneven bars, and much easier than the beam. It’s just a big climbing frame, and you’re a kid in the park again. Breath, focus, and don’t look down.

Clearing my mind, I focused only on my body, on the motion of hand over hand, of foot coming up to follow foot, of moving to a rhythm that I could sustain without any mistakes, but that would get me away from that big black building as fast as possible. An explosion, no matter on which floor, could easily take the crane or destabilize anything near it.

The vertical climb was straightforward, and I accomplished it in seconds on a surge of adrenalin and rage that was so controlled that it felt it belonged to someone else. Moving from the mast across the horizontal traverse of the crane's jib was a much more painful task, requiring me to pull myself through a narrow triangular space bound with slender, widely-spaced steel bars designed to support a trolley rather than a human being. I made myself move more slowly and again told myself not to look down. When I felt a spasm in one of my thigh muscles, I stopped moving, realizing that I was about half-way across the chasm between the two building sites but had no idea how much time had passed since leaving the roof.

Then I felt the first tremor. It was more of a shimmer of the air around me than a sound, but I knew what it meant and urged myself forward again. There was a single boom, like a contained roar, and the frame around me shuddered and swayed and tilted forward as I hung on and kept moving. There were other, human sounds, which I forced myself to shut out, as I felt the heavy dust settle in my eyes and mouth.

As I neared the end of my crawl, I realized that the mid-air movement of the jib, terrifying as it had been, had worked in my favor, making the drop to the neighboring construction site significantly shorter. Gathering myself, I tucked and rolled, and it was done. Finally, I could relax. I sank to the floor, my legs shaking uncontrollably, and remained in place, head cradled between my arms, for at least two minutes. I would have to find a way down to the lower floors and out of the enclosed building site, but not until I could stand up again. When my legs were steady, and I felt I could trust my voice, I reached for the phone, which was covered in a fine layer of dust.

“Fucking bastard,” I said. “Not you, Arkady.”

There was a short laugh on the other end. “Thank you, Harley. I told him the same. Do you have my drive?”

“I have a piece of my mind for him. I’m going to fucking kill him.”

Then I heard J.'s voice. “Leave Ark out of this,” he said. He sounded like he was trying not to laugh. “Do you know how to get to the Highline from where you are?”

The Highline, brain child of Gotham architects Pinkney & Pinkney, was a three-mile, tree-lined walkway that wound its way about twenty stories off the ground around some of Gotham City’s best-known businesses and most sought after high-rise residences. Access to the Highline was only through these sites or a couple of little-known public entrances.

“I know the Highline, you asshole.”

The Joker was laughing so hard by now that that he could hardly talk.

Not long afterwards, I walked towards him through a private roof garden at the top of a prime piece of real estate. It was a beautiful, secluded place in the middle of the city, half of it covered over with grass and half with figured concrete. A little fountain played in the corner. It was all so calm and pretty that it made me even madder than I was already.

J., who hated strong sunlight, was standing in the shade next to a tiny round table and two garden chairs, not a hair out of place. He gestured at the trellis behind him.

“I should really give you roses after all that,” he said. His eyes glinted.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.

“Why didn’t I tell you what?”

“What you were planning.”

“Stupid question. Because you wouldn’t have done it.”

“You’re so wrong. That’s why I’m mad with you. Don’t you understand?”

He raised his eyebrows. I was beyond caring whether he hit me or not.

“You don’t believe me. Why do you think I wouldn’t have done it? Because you wouldn’t do it? What you could have said was: I might have to blow up the building while you’re still inside, I’ll warn you, but you’ll have to get out of there by yourself. I’d have done it for you anyway. You really don’t get it, do you?”

A strange look came into his eyes and he reached into his jacket. Much to my surprise, he took out the pistol. “You can have this,” he said. “Just give me that drive.”

“Give me the pistol first.”

He threw it across.

“Now I’m going to shoot you,” I said. “Because you never tell me anything.”

He burst out laughing, the scars at the corner of his mouth riding so high up his face that it was painful for me to see. He wiped his eyes on his knuckles.

“You’ve never used a gun in your life, and now you’re going to shoot me? That’s adorable. Come here and” – he started laughing again – “give me the drive.”

I sent the first shot smashing through the trellis behind him to see what kind of damage it would do. Then I aimed for his left shoulder and missed. I fired again. He was almost crying with laughter by now, but he was also bleeding. The third shot had nicked him above the elbow.

‘You idiot,” he said. “Drop the gun and give me that drive.”

“I prefer knives,” I said. “Or bats.” I looked at the pistol’s muzzle and touched it. It was burning hot. I winced and dropped it. It skittered across the concrete surface of the paving and came to rest in a puddle of blinding sunshine. “Thought I wasn’t going to shoot you?”

“You didn’t really shoot me.” He grimaced and sat down on one of the delicate little chairs, holding his arm carefully across his body. “That whole credibility thing of yours, it needs work, Harley. You’re not frightening. You just come off as imbalanced.”

“Is there anything I can do that will make you believe me?”

“If you really do shoot me, you’ll never find out. Come here, pumpkin.” He patted his knee.

I shook my head. I was still shaking, but it wasn’t with rage. It occurred to me that I might have hit an artery or a vital organ by accident and would have had no way to deal with it up there.

His long eyes narrowed. “Calm down,” he said. “You didn’t have a hope of killing me.”

I sat on his lap and took off his tie.

“The drive.”

I fished in my bra and gave it to him, and he snatched the tie away from me. “I’m not letting you put that round my arm,” he said. “You’ve already ruined my shirt.”

“You deserved it.”

“I should strangle you with it.”

I put my head on his shoulder. “I love you so much,” I said. “I wish I didn’t.”

He closed his arms around my back and didn’t say anything.

There was a tremendous boom followed several cavernous echoes. He sighed. “With any luck, there goes the rest of the failover server. We left some little incendiary devices to go off later. Just in case.”

“Don’t they back all these things up remotely?” I asked. ‘What’s the point?”

“Yes,” he said. “But back-up’s been down for several weeks now. And the routine’s highly problematic. It's going to be so much work to reconstruct the data, and so many things will have vanished in the process.”

“Huh.”

“There were also some documents on the fiftieth floor and possibly elsewhere that no-one had the time to shred. Poof. Poor Feds. Secondary explosions are something of a best practice really."

I grinned.

“You’re easy to impress,” he said, and pinched my chin. “Pathetic, really.” He gave me a long kiss and clambered to his feet. I stood on the tips of my toes, wrapping my arms around his neck.

“You’re bleeding again,” I said. "Let me see."

He swatted me away and grasped my wrist. “Want to bet Bats is already there? We should go and say hello.”

Holding hands, we walked out of the garden, back towards the city where a smudged yellow sun rode high against an expanding cloud of black on the horizon.

J. looked up to the sky.

"It's a perfect day already," he said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many of you will realize that the ending here is a twist on 'Harlequinade' from 'Batman: The Animated Series'. The biggest change that I made was swapping Harley's fake gun for a real gun. I could go on about the various reasons why I made that and other changes, but it doesn't matter. What matters is whether it works or not. You're the best judges of that.
> 
> Speaking of judges and judgement ... that stupid crane. Why would an orthopedist be able to identify the different parts of a crane so accurately? I could come up with some flimsy pretext for why Harley knows what a jib and a mast are, but it's really sloppy, shitty characterization on my part. Well, I'm going to leave it in there as a lesson to myself and also because I love cranes.
> 
> Also, because a couple of people have asked, I want to be clear that I haven't done any of the things I've described in this story, nor have they been done to me. Specifically, I do not think that non-consensual sadomasochism - which is one of several things that's happening here - is cool, and no, it's not something I fantasize about. But it's important to remember that writing about Very Bad and Fucked Up Things, or having fun reading about them, whether or not they are part of our lives, does not make us bad and fucked people or mean that we idealize bad and fucked up relationships. That goes especially for a close relative of mine who told me that I must be evil or deeply disturbed (LOL) to be able to write certain scenes, and suggested that I focus on "nicer things."
> 
> I don't know about nicer things. Since I can't see myself joining the Care Bears fandom any time soon, I would very much welcome any evil suggestions that you may have.
> 
> The story's done now, besides Nightwing's very short wrap-up, which is totally optional and kind of like a dark chocolate mint at the end of a meal. Mints are not to everyone's taste, but I happen to enjoy them. They give you a different perspective on what you've just eaten.
> 
> Thank you. It's a privilege to have this space.


	13. Epilogue: Nightwing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And the good guys pick up the pieces.

The smoke billowed behind her, a thick moving curtain, and she held the pistol in both hands, pointing it towards me. The man behind her lay propped on his elbow, laughing softly. A small puddle of his own blood was forming around his arm.

“Get away from him or I’ll shoot.”

“You don’t have to do this, Harleen. You’re a good person. Drop the gun.”

“I said get away from him. Move back now.”

I saw that her hands were shaking slightly, but her voice was strong, and her eyes were bright with rage. The wind from the helicopter’s propellers whipped her hair into dark gold strands around her face.

“Reach for those clubs, Nightwing, and I’ll shoot. I’ve used a gun before.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“You’re not touching him. I said move back.”

“He doesn’t love you.”

“I know that, and I don’t care,” she said.

She took a couple of steady paces towards me, her pretty white teeth bared.

"What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing. Everything. I said you don't fucking go near him.”

Men were climbing down now to help the Joker to his feet and towards the helicopter. His side was sticky with blood and he was still chuckling. It was only a minor wound, but she pulled the band off her head with one hand and threw it towards him without looking in his direction, using the other hand to keep the pistol pointing steadily towards me.

“Apply pressure,” she shouted, but the noise from the helicopter almost drowned out her words.

“You’re not well, Harleen,” I shouted. “Stop this. We can get you help.”

The tears were running down her face now, but the pistol didn’t waver, and I didn’t like my chances if the poor crazy girl decided to shoot at such close range.

“Anything happens to him and I’ll burn this city down. It’s nothing without him.”

She backed further towards the helicopter, covering him as he reached its entrance. Then he turned around and looked at me. His eyes were almost black in the strange half-light of the fire, and he flipped his middle finger, grinned, and mouthed something. I couldn’t make out the words over the noise, but I heard what he said in my head as clearly as if his mouth had been pressed up against my ear.

“The bad boys get the best girls, Boy Wonder.”

Then he was gone, and the overwhelming noise trailed off quickly into the sky and out of earshot. Harleen Quinzel lowered her pistol slowly and bowed her head. We were alone now. She let the pistol clatter to the ground and approached me with her wrists held together.

“I’m done here. You can take me into custody.”

The batcuffs were ready at my side, but I didn’t use them. There was no resistance left in her.

“Why?” I asked her again.

“I don’t know,” she said in a small voice. “I’d do anything for him. That’s just how it is.”

“But he’s completely deranged. Psycho. Disturbed. Nutso. Unbala-"

“You don’t get to choose who you fall for, Nightwing.”

Up close, I could see the bruising round her eye and a small cut on her lower lip. Her blue eyes were clouded.

“You know you’ll lose your license if you go on this way."

“I know.”

“He’s destroying you.”

She flashed a brief, disoriented smile. “Yes,” she said. “He’s brilliant. There isn’t anyone like him. He just - ” she waved her hands – “ - he just gets me.”

“I don’t want to arrest you, “I said. “You haven’t actually done anything that I can see besides waving that gun in my face. And I think you’ll get worse in jail.”

She shut her eyes. “You don’t know. You should arrest me.”

“It won’t help. You can’t get away from him so easily.”

“No, I can’t,” she whispered. She hung her head like a child, as if she were apologizing not just to me but to the whole world around us. I walked up and put my arms around her. She leaned her head on my chest and we stood that way for a while, watching the sky get dark over Gotham City.


End file.
